The ex-directors of the company Bosques Naturales prosecuted for defrauding 6,000 investors are acquitted

The Madrid Court has acquitted two former directors of the Bosques Naturales company and an auditor who were tried last November for aggravated fraud and continued falsification of accounts.

After the massive investment of more than 6,000 people between 1996 and 2006 to plant 265,862 trees and the subsequent sale of its wood, the company entered bankruptcy with a hole of 30 million and a bunch of investors denounced the disastrous economic management of the leadership of the firm before going bankrupt, a commitment that the accusations branded as a pyramid scheme but that now the justice system does not consider a crime.

The magistrates acquit the owner of the firm, Ángel Briones, the former financial director Julián López and the auditor Manuel Rodríguez, who had a criminal record, of all charges.

"It is not sufficiently proven that the two defendants maliciously pretended to have a solvency that they lacked in common agreement, they staged an artificial and insidious mechanism that misled numerous arborists," the sentence reads.

The Madrid Court points out that neither López nor Briones - the brother of Francisco Briones, convicted of the pyramid scheme of the Philatelic Forum with close to 200,000 affected - appropriated other people's money and that both cannot be blamed for the situation of the trees in 2017, a decade after they left their positions as managers.

Aerial view of a farm with Natural Forest trees in Villanueva de la Vera (Cáceres).

In parallel, the magistrates deny that there was "deception" and stress that it was "obvious" that the investment in Natural Forests implied a risk derived "directly from the long maturation period, between 20 and 25 years, until the purpose is obtained. of the contract".

That is, until the seedlings were growing and the wood from the trees—ash, pear, walnut, and cherry—was ready for the sawmill.

"From the clauses of the contracts it cannot be derived that the company guarantees profitability or the safe existence of an amount repaid on the expiration date, nor is it presented to customers as a safe investment with the commitment to repurchase", highlights the failed.

Between 1996 and 2006, a total of 6,247 people invested money to buy tree seedlings whose wood would give them benefits after 25 years of irrigation, pruning and care.

This green investment was a fiasco and foundered after a decade of mismanagement and 10,843 contracts with private individuals behind it to see trees grow on 200 farms, a total of 1,326 hectares spread over Toledo, Cáceres, Cuenca, Girona and A Coruña.

Private investments ranged from the most modest of 5,000 euros to peaks of 120,000 euros.

The fundamental reason that explains the decline of Bosques Naturales was contagion with the Philatelic Forum scam in 2006. New investors fled and sales plummeted due to the family link between both domes and certain similarities such as the necessary confidence in the product.

From more than 2 million euros in revenue in 2005, the firm went to just 284,356 euros in 2006.

"The trees existed, were located and were maintained at least until 2007 in a reasonably adequate manner (...) The hypothesis that the defendants had designed a deceptive machination after a previous concert, obtaining the profit pursued from the beginning, has not been corroborated by the evidence procedures carried out”, add the judges.

Pilar Comín, who invested in Bosques Naturales, last October in Barcelona.Carles Ribas

During the oral hearing, the former commercial director of the company, Crescencio Lozano, argued that they did not put pressure on clients and that nobody assured them of anything.

As commercial manager, he argued that they were "convinced of what they were selling, that noble wood was costing more and more, that it was not a safe investment since the tree could die, and that what was done were predictions with a minimum period of 20 years for the felling of the tree”.

In parallel, the agronomist and professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, who had an agreement with Bosques Naturales, stressed that "he knew the planting, care and maintenance procedures, that his management was confirmed by engineers, who saw the suitability of the farms and of the maintenance of the crop, a maintenance plan, intensive cultivation to produce wood and that the development of the species was adequate”.

One of the affected parties, the agronomist Álvaro Ortiz, recounted in the courtroom having invested 48,000 euros, aware that it was a "risky operation", that they offered him to buy back other trees and that he never went to see the ones acquired on the farms in Toledo, Cáceres and Basin.

Instead, Bernardo Eusebio Villanueva invested 25,000 euros "thinking there was security, liquidity and profitability" as the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the CSIC and the autonomous community of Extremadura were behind the project, until he realized that the business was " ruinous” and filed a claim for nullity of the contract, which he lost in court.

The judges dismissed the nullity of the contracts because they lacked a clause for a repurchase agreement or offer of restitution.

The lawyer for the acquitted firm's auditor, Ramiro Pérez, considers that the investigation advanced "due to procedural inertia" and was "badly founded."

“It happened due to the contagion of Art and Nature”, estimates the lawyer in reference to the other pyramid scheme of works of art that appropriated 434 million of 19,360 victims between 1996 and 2006, the same decade as the Bosques Naturales boom.

After 13 years of investigation and the recent trial, the private prosecution, which requested seven years in prison for the former directors and accused of fraud and falsification of accounts -the Prosecutor for Economic Crimes only did so for this last crime-, will not appeal the sentence In second instance.

Bosques Naturales survived the plummeting sales, the annulment claims of 149 investors and the bankruptcy, until last June the Commercial Court number 10 of Madrid accepted the agreement proposed by the bankruptcy administration to settle the debt of 46.3 million that it maintained with the creditors.

Today the firm maintains 27 employees and invoices 1.5 million a year.

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