The National audience has opened oral proceedings against the president of Urbas, Juan Antonio Acedo placeholder image, and its predecessor, Juan Antonio Ibáñez, as well as against twelve other people for the capital increase of 2015. He asks them for a bail of almost 16 million euros.
The head of the central court of Instruction number 4, José Luis Calama, agrees the provisional dismissal of the case with respect to Urbas, and six other legal persons and two natural persons as there are no rational indications of criminality.
The case began in 2017, following a complaint from the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, and investigates the alleged irregularities in the capital increase executed for an amount of 384 million euros, which were provided through assets «overvalued»Of Aldira Inversiones Inmobiliarias.
The Prosecutor’s Office requested 8 years and three months in prison
At the beginning of April, the Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office requested 8 years and three months in prison for Acedo and another eight for Ibáñez, for alleged corporate crimes and crimes against the market in the aforementioned expansion; in addition to compensating the company with 10.8 million and the cancellation of the expansion. For the other twelve people, the penalties claimed ranged from 6 years to 10 months.
Anti-corruption indicated that the expansion was carried out through a non-monetary contribution of 100% of Aldira’s shares. Thus, the operation did not include any monetary capital increase, “Despite Urbas’s vital need for liquidity”Instead, what was carried out was an infusion of “extremely overvalued” real estate.
In May 2015, the Board of Directors of the company approved a report to justify before the General Meeting the opportunity to carry out the expansion, a document that, continues the Prosecutor’s Office, was based on the “fictitious overvaluation of Aldira’s real estate assets.”
For Anti-Corruption, both the Urbas council’s assessment and the conclusions of the report made by Grant Thornton “They were irrational and alien” to the reality not only of the farms and companies contributed, but of the general economic situation and the real estate sector in particular.
The 2015 enlargement
The Board, at its meeting on July 10, 2015, authorized the operation “on the basis of the mendacious report”, which allowed the company to register with the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) the admission of new shares, which they were transmitted to 62 natural and legal persons.
Coinciding with the signing of Grant Thorton’s report on the expansion, properties for an amount of 11.3 million euros were added to Urbas’s assets when that same day they were acquired from third parties for 562,240 euros.
The consideration by Urbas for this operation did not consist in cash, but in the assignment of a credit right of 10.8 million that the company had against three companies related to the administrators of the entity. The National Court rejected Urbas’s appeal against the process.
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