The founder of The Patriarch, Lucien Engelmajer, in the late eighties in France.AFP
The president of the NGO for the rehabilitation of drug addicts Dianova International, Mary Christine Lizarza, appeared between 1998 and 2004 in an opaque foundation in Vaduz (Liechtenstein) that accumulated at least 53 million euros, according to an investigation by EL PAÍS.
The money that moved the institution to which Lizarza belonged has its origin in the funds evaded from the treasury by the entity that preceded Dianova until 1998, El Patriarca, an organization for the treatment of drug addicts that wove a network in Switzerland and Luxembourg to defraud 77 .5 million euros, according to the documents.
The capital not declared by El Patriarca came from private donations and the street sale of books between 1983 and 1998.
The president of Dianova International —an institution established in Spain, Chile, Nicaragua, Uruguay and the US— was part of the board of directors of Dianova Spain until 2020, according to the report of this entity, which defines itself as a “social action” NGO nonprofit".
The Spanish subsidiary of Dianova has centers in Madrid, Barcelona and Córdoba, it has received 4.4 million from the Community of Madrid since 2016 for rehabilitating drug addicts and sheltering minors.
And it has maintained agreements with the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Junta de Andalucía, the councils of Álava, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa and the Madrid City Council, among 29 other public institutions.
Lizarza landed on the board of the OILJE foundation in Liechtenstein in April 1998 along with seven other former members of El Patriarca.
OILJE changed its name to Pronova and in October 2000 moved a total of 53 million euros, which today would exceed 86 with the inflation update.
OILJE's heir foundation absorbed most of the funds that The Patriarch came to manage in Switzerland.
A fortune that amounted in 1998 to 66.7 million in 13 accounts in the Swiss banks SBS (today integrated into UBS), Banque Cantonale de Genève and BSI Genève, according to internal documents.
A member of the board of the OILJE foundation frames the constitution of the entity of Liechtenstein, a micro-State of 38,000 inhabitants that welcomes individuals and companies that maneuver to pay less taxes, in an armor strategy.
"Liechtenstein was much more hermetic than Switzerland and, furthermore, we wanted to protect Engelmajer from justice," says this source, referring to the founder of El Patriarca, Lucien Engelmajer, who died in Belize in 2007 at the age of 86 involved in accusations of tax fraud. and sexual abuse.
A former director of Dianova and two of El Patriarca reveal for the first time that Lizarza, who was responsible for the latter organization in Portugal in the 1990s, knew about the tax evasion mechanism that Engelmajer set up to avoid paying taxes.
A scheme that was deployed in the delegations of The Patriarch of Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Belgium to not declare private donations and the street sale of books between 1983 and 1998.
“In 2006 there were 80 million in Liechtenstein”
Guillermo Díaz belonged to Dianova until 2006 and was one of those responsible for El Patriarca in Mexico and Nicaragua.
He maintains that he was informed
of Dianova International's
offshore scheme.
"In 2006, there were still 80 million euros in Liechtenstein, according to what they told us that year at a meeting in Barcelona," says the man who was also director of the NGO's Santa Elena center in Puente Genil (Córdoba).
Díaz assures that the current president of Dianova Internacional "knew the operation of the El Patriarca fund concealment system because she was responsible for it in Portugal."
And she confesses that he himself participated in sending money to Switzerland.
“In 1995, I received a call from Dolores Juan Llabrés, then treasurer of El Patriarca in Spain.
She told me that a collaborator was sick and asked me to take 240,000 euros from two weeks of book sales to France.
I put the money in a gym bag and did the job.
In France, they pooled funds from Portugal and Spain.
The sum was then sent in a truck to Switzerland,” says Díaz, 63.
The former director of El Patriarca who commissioned Díaz to transport the money confirms this information.
"Guillermo was of my utmost confidence and surely I gave him that amount to take it to France," admits Llabrés.
Fulvio Campanile, who was president of El Patriarca in Italy between 1990 and 1996, recounts the fraud mechanism this way: “Every month, we put a million euros of the collection in a bag.
A truck came to Italy and transported the money to Switzerland at night.
Lizarza, who was in charge in Portugal, found out about the [evasion] scheme by force.
He knew that the funds were not declared to the Treasury.
The Patriarch of Portugal also sent money to Switzerland”, admits Campanile.
The one who was an accountant for El Patriarca in France between 1985 and 1998, Dominique Ruhl, coincides with her former colleague in the role that the president of Dianova International supposedly played.
“What if Christine Lizarza knew?
Of course I do, more than anyone.
She was the boss in Portugal, from where they sent the black money.
The funds collected traveled in the cab of the truck, where the driver's bed is, but there were different ways of getting the money to the Swiss country, ”she recalls.
Ruhl was sentenced in 2007 by a court in Toulouse (France) to two years in prison for manipulating the accounting of El Patriarca France following Engelmajer's instructions, but she did not go to prison.
This newspaper has tried unsuccessfully to collect Lizarza's version.
Díaz, Campanile and Ruhl maintain that, along with Lizarza, the general director of Dianova Internacional, Montserrat Rafel, who is a member of the NGO's board of directors in Spain, was also aware of the scheme for sending funds to Swiss banks.
Rafel was responsible in the nineties in Spain for El Patriarca, an institution that spread a network of 350 offices in 18 countries and became the main organization for the rehabilitation of drug addicts in Europe until 1998.
Rafel confirms to EL PAÍS that Lizarza was a member of the OILJE foundation in Liechtenstein between 1998 and 2004. “When we learned of the existence of this foundation, we realized that its members were close to Engelmajer.
Therefore, with the aim of debugging responsibilities and carrying out the intended transformation, in April 1998, several people with an impeccable track record and who had nothing to do with previous malpractices were asked to agree to join the board of trustees, among them was Christine Lizarza, who maintained that designation until 2004″, the Dianova board of directors responded in an email.
Rafel frames Lizarza's presence in the
offshore
racket in Engelmajer's “unilateral decisions” and separates Dianova from the mechanism for sending funds to Switzerland.
“Dianova has nothing to do with The Patriarch.
We abide by professional practices and render accounts with total transparency”, adds the CEO.
Based in Geneva (Switzerland), Dianova International is an organization that has treated 127,855 people, brings together 600 collaborators, 2,000 volunteers and registers an asset of 2.7 million, according to its latest report, from 2021. The institution has consultative status — according to this document— of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations (ECOSOC) and UNESCO and is registered as a civil organization in the Organization of American States (OAS).
Its Spanish subsidiary employs 66 professionals and manages the Can Parellada addiction treatment center in l'Ametlla del Vallès (Barcelona), which last year assisted 143 people thanks to an agreement with the Generalitat of Catalonia and the Madrid City Council (Madrid Health).
The institution also controls a unit for minors between the ages of 14 and 17 in Puente Genil (Córdoba), which receives funds from the Community of Madrid, the Government of the Canary Islands and the Region of Murcia, according to the 2021 report, when Dianova Spain entered 804,827 euros in subsidies and registered an asset of 2.2 million.
Dianova Spain was involved in a controversy in 2017 after it emerged that the NGO was gathering drug addicts and refugee families with children at its center in Ambite (Madrid).
A year earlier, employees and former employees of the organization sent a report to the Ministry of Employment that denounced that beneficiaries of the CAH, the aid program for immigrants recently arrived in Spain, were used by the NGO as labor to carry out reforms in the center without security measures or taking out accident insurance, according to Cadena Ser.
The institution disassociates itself from its past
Dianova Internacional, the brand that El Patriarca has used since 1998 to disassociate itself from the accusations of sexual abuse and money laundering that cornered its founder, Lucien Engelmajer, distances itself from its origins.
The general director of the NGO, Montserrat Rafel, defends that the current structure of the organization for the rehabilitation of drug addicts is not stained by the legal cases that surrounded Engelmajer.
“Neither the judicial process for capital evasion in Italy, initiated in 1996, nor the one in France in 2001 against El Patriarca, splashed Dianova and its leaders, beyond complying with all the extremes of the rogatory commission sent to him by the different judicial authorities”, explains the directive by mail.
Rafel, who was president of El Patriarca España in the 1990s (when the organization placed 66.7 million in Swiss banks) also stands out from this money-laundering scheme.
“Neither Ms. Lizarza nor I myself have anything to do with or have participated in the actions carried out by Mr. Engelmajer, quite the contrary.
Since the beginning of the change process, we have worked and firmly supported the transition and organizational transformation of Dianova”, indicates the head of the NGO.
investigacion@elpais.es
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