New doubts about companies linked to Ayuso’s partner

Accounting opacity, a record profit that a year later turns into a loss and a mysterious loan of 955,000 euros of unknown origin to buy a luxury penthouse. These are some of the new doubts raised by the latest accounts of two companies linked to the confessed fraudster Alberto González Amador and the penthouse he enjoys with his partner, Isabel Díaz Ayuso.

Almost simultaneously, the 2023 accounts of Babia Capital, owner of that luxury apartment in the Madrid neighborhood of Chamberí, and of Maxwell Cremona, the company through which González Amador has been billing for his consulting work for the private healthcare giant Quirón for years, have been filed in the Commercial Registry.

And these accounts confirm some suspicions and raise new questions about the events being investigated by a Madrid judge, which Ayuso described as soon as the scandal broke out as “a savage investigation by the Treasury that was orchestrated to harm me.”

In the case of Babia Capital, the most striking development is a loan of 955,000 euros that this company received from someone (an individual or a company) last year. It was in July 2023 when Babia signed the deed for the purchase of that penthouse, in the same building as the apartment that Ayuso’s partner bought a year earlier, after his tax fraud.

The Babia Capital penthouse was acquired two days after the purchase of the apartment was registered in the Madrid Property Registry in the name of Ayuso’s partner, with a significant delay: one year after the acquisition of that property and after the regional elections in May.

González Amador’s flat was registered with a mortgage of half a million, but the penthouse in Babia has no mortgage, according to the Property Registry. The accounts that have now been filed confirm that the company did not ask the banks for money to acquire it either: it was paid in cash, although with money from a third party.

Borrowing from banks would have been normal for such a small company, unable to handle such a large-scale operation. Instead, Babia records 955,000 euros in “other long-term debts” in its accounts, but not with financial institutions, since this debt was even reduced in 2023. This amount corresponds to the purchase price of the penthouse, if we take into account the increase in Babia’s “fixed assets” item, of nearly one million in 2023.

With this new information in hand, a tax expert, who asks to remain anonymous, believes that “an inspection” by the Treasury should be launched, if it has not already been done, given the suspicion that Babia Capital is a mere shell company. In addition, Ayuso is a politically exposed person (PEP), with significant public responsibilities and more susceptible to participating in acts of bribery or corruption.

The obvious question is, once again, who paid for that penthouse, and in exchange for what. Last Friday, the spokesperson for Más Madrid in the Madrid City Council, Rita Maestre, wondered on the social network X if “this is a case of front men, commission agents and payment in kind” for the health contracts awarded to Quirón by the Community of Madrid.

Without employees, the activity figures of this real estate agency are very discreet. Last year its turnover doubled to just over 200,000 euros. When this newspaper asked the president’s team about the luxury penthouse in March, their only response was that they do not pay rent for that or any other property at present. Ayuso has never given explanations about the property.

The Leonese track

Many paths in this story lead to León. Babia Capital, named after the region of León, has as its sole administrator the lawyer from León who advised González Amador throughout the tax inspection, Javier Gómez. The owner of the majority of its shares is a hotelier from León, Jorge Carlos Pablos Alonso.

And the Quirón director Fernando Camino, who was key in González Amador’s professional rise, is closely linked to that city, as is the person who made the 2 million dollar profit that Ayuso’s partner made by mediating the sale of medical supplies to a Galician company, Mape, of which Camino is a director.

Babia Capital has had its headquarters in Madrid for two years, but its first registered office (and the one it once again records in the 2023 accounts it has submitted to the Commercial Registry) is at number 19 Gran Vía de San Marcos in León. On the same street, about 500 metres away, is one of the properties of Fernando Camino’s wife, Gloria Carrasco, belonging to a well-known family of pharmacists from León.

Also in Ponferrada is the advisor Blanca López, who was handling the accounts for González Amador’s company Maxwell Cremona when he began defrauding the Treasury. A certain “Blanca” appears as the author of the document containing Maxwell Cremona’s accounts for the year 2023. The contact telephone number that appears is a number in León.

In these 2023 accounts, Maxwell Cremona has corrected the 2022 results: from a profit of almost 1.9 million, it has gone on to declare losses of 100,000 euros. The document, very sparse in information, does not detail the tax contingencies that the company has open, denounced by the Prosecutor’s Office this year for two tax crimes and another for falsification of documents.

The accounts also do not explain the reason for this retroactive modification of the 2022 result. This change comes after on July 24, 2023, three days after Babia signed the deed of purchase of that apartment, Alberto González Amador attempted a tax regularization totally out of term in the 2022 Corporate Tax.

She intended to cancel the false invoices issued by two front companies in Mexico and the Ivory Coast. But by then the Treasury had already made a very advanced inspection and such regularisation was legally impossible: it was not spontaneous and there was an ongoing investigation. This manoeuvre, which would explain why Ayuso went so far as to say that the Treasury owed her partner 600,000 euros when the scandal broke, was useless.

As the Tax Agency reproached González Amador in its report, “once the inspection procedure had begun and upon verifying that the Inspection did not accept the explanations and justifications given by the taxpayer, he tried to exonerate himself by informing the Inspection that he was proceeding to cancel most of the invoices that were deemed false or falsified – not all of them – and to record and declare them as higher income in the 2022 financial year.”

“It is clear that this way of proceeding is neither tax-correct nor, of course, does it constitute a regularisation of Maxwell Cremona’s tax situation,” the Treasury determined. “It is not a voluntary regularisation,” his lawyer would confirm months later when he acknowledged the fraud in writing.

Four times more

González Amador quadrupled the money he received from Quirón after starting his relationship with Ayuso. In 2023, sales of his company Maxwell Cremona soared by 79%, to 1.89 million. A very significant part of that money, if not all, came from Quirón, his main and almost only client.

In March 2023, the healthcare group explained to the Tax Agency, at the request of the Inspectorate, that Maxwell Cremona’s collaborators (the company has no employees, according to its accounts) were still carrying out part of the work that it had agreed with the businessman in a €600,000 contract signed at the end of 2021.

Specifically, consulting services for “the expansion of the Quirón SL Group in Latin America” and for the implementation of a quality seal for the sector, the JCI (Joint Commission International), at the Jiménez Díaz Foundation, Quirón’s flagship hospital in Madrid very close to the penthouse and the apartment.

To artificially reduce his tax bill, González Amador diverted part of that work in 2021 through a cosmetics company with hardly any activity, Círculo Belleza SL, which was in the name of Fernando Camino’s wife. Ayuso’s partner paid half a million for it in December 2020, after making a killing with the masks. He renamed it Masterman & Whitaker Medical Supplies and Health Process Engineering SL. And he sold it to himself a year later for just 3,300 euros.

As the Tax Agency highlighted in its report, in 2021 “through the interposed company Círculo Belleza/Masterman SL, it began to provide services to Quirón Prevención SL consisting of the project for the Expansion of the Quirón SL Group in Latin America”. Quirón has never explained what González Amador’s work thousands of kilometres from Madrid consisted of.

En to Argentina de Milei

In the Argentina of Javier Milei, recently decorated by Ayuso on her last and controversial visit to Madrid, Fernando Camino has been a director for years of a local mutual in which Quirón has a 7.15% stake, Asociart. He was appointed “alternate” director there in 2019 alongside the Spanish businessman Manuel Piñera Gil-Delgado, son-in-law of the founder of DYC whisky and a member of the inner circle of friends of Juan Carlos I.

In the tax haven of Panama, before joining Quirón (in 2013), Camino created a company, Insumos Médicos del Pacífico, which González Amador managed throughout his tax fraud and until 2022. The person in charge of closing it was a collaborator of his consultancy firm, César Nieto. With him, Ayuso’s partner set up a tourist accommodation company in Usera in 2022 and a company apparently dedicated to real estate business in Florida (United States) in October of that year.

A few months later, on September 4, 2023, officials from the Tax Agency issued a Proposal for Liquidation Linked to Crime against González Amador and several of the people he used as front men through false invoices and shell companies to defraud more than 350,000 euros in the years 2020 and 2021. He himself confessed this in writing through his lawyer before the case came to light. But, according to Ayuso, his partner “is not involved in any plot.”