The controversial Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez, who was one of the best-known lawyers in Spain for his relationship with celebrities and dark cases, has been sentenced to four years in prison for serious fraud and professional intrusion, for having taken 120,000 euros from four people, whom he deceived with a false millionaire business of buying and selling oil from the Argentine company YPF. The Provincial Court of Madrid also condemned him because he posed as a practicing lawyer, when at the time of the events, at the end of 2014, he was suspended by the Madrid Bar Association. Rodríguez has previously been convicted of crimes of fraud to the Treasury and for distributing an intimate video of Pedro J. Ramírez, has passed through Spanish prisons and has been on the run in Argentina, where he founded a law firm in Buenos Aires, although he could not practice there either.
Rodríguez Menéndez began the entanglement until the scam in June 2014, when he lived on horseback between Madrid and Buenos Aires. That month he opened in Madrid, despite being suspended, a law firm to whose inauguration he invited his victims. There he began to tell them "his projects to try to bring Argentine oil and its derivatives to Spain through a contract with YPF, thanks to "his contacts within the Government of the Argentine Republic," according to the sentence. All for free, of course, for friendship with the family. But money was needed for negotiations, and so he managed to get Isaac S. to give him 33,100 euros; that Ángel Luis E. provided him with another 37,500; and the couple Cristina R. and Jesus V. gave him another 33,100 euros.
The business consisted of creating three companies in Argentina to be able to work with YPF and that through them "the purchase and sale and supply of oil of the state energy entity" would be channeled. The alleged lawyer, he said, spent his life between Madrid and Buenos Aires, a circumstance that he took advantage of to defraud another 13,619 euros from his victims as alleged travel expenses. These companies were never constituted and the money, so far, has not appeared.
The convicted lawyer denied in the trial that he had received money from his victims, but that it was he who has spent money "on inviting them and on trips". He even went so far as to say that they "took advantage" of him. And he denied any commitment or legal representation on his part. As he did not deliver invoices for the disbursements to his victims, Rodríguez clung to that thesis, which the judges of the Seventh Section of the Provincial Court of Madrid have rejected.
Lawyer Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez, handcuffed and escorted by Argentine police after his arrest. in Buenos Aires in 2012.REUTERS
Thus, in view of the documentation, the statements of witnesses, the investigations, the judges did not buy this excuse, and have sentenced him for aggravated fraud to three years in prison; another year for usurpation of functions and professional intrusion, as well as the payment of 177,399 euros in compensation, a fine of 4,000 euros and partial payment of costs. He has been acquitted of the crimes of forgery, money laundering, misappropriation, coercion and procedural fraud. This judgement may be appealed in cassation to the Supreme Court.
Rodríguez Menéndez, who applied for Argentine citizenship, adds one more note to his record (despite the fact that he has canceled his criminal record), whose most notorious line was the sentence to two years in prison in 2005 for having disseminated in 1997 a video of sexual content in which the privacy of the director of El Mundo was attacked. Pedro J. Ramirez. He then fled to Argentina, although he was arrested in 2006 when he tried to return in hiding to visit his mother. He was imprisoned and, that same year, the Supreme Court raised from six to ten years another sentence that already weighed on him for defrauding four million euros between 1990 and 1994 to the Spanish Treasury. In August 2008, after spending several months in prison, he escaped again on a four-day leave.