The priest David Vargas (right) with his lawyer, in January.ALBERT GARCIA
The Court of Barcelona has sentenced David Vargas, the ex-priest investigated for defrauding parishioners, to three years in prison for falsifying a wedding between two octogenarians to achieve an inheritance, in a sentence that declares the Bishopric of Vic civil liable for not having detected deception.
The tenth section of the Audiencia de Barcelona condemns Vargas, who was rector of the parish of Sant Vicenç de Castellet (Barcelona), for a crime of documentary falsification, and also imposes a year and a half in jail on the daughter of the woman who contracted the false wedding, for signing as a witness to it.
A priest who officiated a fake wedding for an inheritance faces eight years in prison
The fake wedding that was worth an inheritance
Both convicts will have to pay 203,934 euros of compensation to the relatives to whom the inheritance corresponded, an amount that could be assumed by the Bishopric of Vic, to which the parish belongs, as a subsidiary civil liable for not having supervised the marriage file and not having detected the "irregularities ”That presented.
In addition to this case, Vargas, who was expelled from the priesthood in 2013, is being investigated by a Barcelona court for defrauding elderly women parishioners of more than 3.5 million euros into granting him the management of their assets and for selling a false relic of a saint to a religious order.
The wedding that the condemned man forged was of a couple of octogenarians who had been living together for several years, until in 2008 the man died, without having left a will and without direct descendants, so that the inheritance, valued at half a million euros, was to end up in the hands of two nephews.
Months after his death, the one who was his de facto partner, now deceased, "arranged" with David Vargas to pretend that they had married in July 2008. For this, the ex-priest filled out the marriage file by hand, in which he He supplanted the identity of the deceased, and the woman's daughter signed as a witness for the liaison, after which she was in charge of processing her registration in the Civil Registry of Sant Vicenç de Castellet so that her mother's "inheritance rights" were recognized.
The false wife was declared heir to the deceased's assets and in turn designated her daughter as successor, after which she signed a reverse mortgage on a property with which she obtained 78,448 euros.
The court, which acquits the defendants of the crime of aggravated fraud of which they were initially accused, recalls that the falsified marriage record is kept in the parish of Sant Vicenç, "under the strictest control and disposition and surveillance of the Bishopric."
According to the court, said matrimonial file suffers from nine "irregularities" that involve "serious breaches of canon law and the civil code", but which the Bishopric did not detect despite the fact that the documentation was at its disposal "for its control".
The Hearing believes that the file "should have been supervised much earlier than the date on which the complaint was made" and warns that "a simple review - not even a thorough one - would have allowed the immediate detection of irregularities in the document," considering how crude they are ”.
Due to the plot of scams to parishioners, the Mossos d'Esquadra arrested the former priest on December 5, 2019, who days later, when he learned that the police had found the suitcase with money and jewelry of the victims in the search of his home, He tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off a bridge in the Ronda de Dalt in Barcelona.
The emergency teams saved his life and took him to the hospital, where he remained admitted in serious condition with various fractures and bruises and, when he left, the investigating judge ordered his arrest and admission to preventive prison, where he remained for months.