The Supreme Court frees the main defendant in the wind plot from paying another six million for a jurisdictional error

The Supreme Court has slammed the door on the Tax Agency's attempt to collect taxes from Alberto Esgueva, the main defendant in the wind scheme, for the alleged commissions he collected from Iberdrola and other companies in exchange for permits for wind farms in Castilla y León. . In a sentence on March 21, annulled the decision of the National Court which, for once, had sided with the Treasury and had forced his company Intercatia to pay some six million euros in taxes. The key is that the treasury report that started the entire case was prepared by the Valladolid delegation despite the fact that Esgueva, a former senior official of the regional public company Excal, had his company's headquarters in Madrid. According to the Supreme Court, the Treasury did not sufficiently motivate the extension of the inspection from Valladolid.

In 2014, the Treasury delegation in Castilla y León pulled a thread that opened the canopy of thunder. In a tax inspection, he ended up detecting signs that large electricity companies paid commissions to senior officials in Castilla y León in exchange for permits to install wind farms. According to Anticorruption, the main beneficiary was Alberto Esgueva. This formed a company with 24,000 euros of capital and became associated with a subsidiary of Iberdrola. In 2009, with the wind farms already approved, he sold his part to the electricity company for 47 million euros from Iberdrola. That amount, according to the prosecution, depended on “the megawatts assigned to the wind farms authorized to the company.”

Esgueva was director of Excal between 2004 and 2006 and later moved to Warsaw to promote luxury buildings. In 2020, before the commission of inquiry of the regional courts, justified his relationship with Iberdrola: “We were lucky to have a very good partner, which was Iberdrola, but nothing more. Because Iberdrola was at that time number one, number one in the world in wind energy. That was the key. But nothing else. It's not that we haven't invested; “We invested our part.”

The prosecution is asking for 12 years in prison for bribery and money laundering and a 65 million euro fine. Only for former deputy councilor Rafael Delgado, he asks for a longer sentence, 42 years. The case is still pending trial – without a date because several of the protagonists also appear in the black pearl macro-case, currently on trial.

Parallel to the Anticorruption investigation, the Treasury opened inspections to Intercatia, San Cayetano Wind and Cronos Global, Esgueva's companies. The treasury considered that he had not paid the corresponding taxes for that sale of shares. In total, about 20 million euros were at stake.

The National Court sided with the former high regional official. In two rulings he considered that an early administrative error, inspecting Esgueva from Valladolid and not from Madrid, had contaminated the entire process. Another section of the Court ruled the opposite, that the Tax Agency had complied with the law by formalizing a document that extended the jurisdiction of Castilla y León to Madrid. He Treasury report that unleashed everything points out that the company San Cayetano, one of those investigated, “had its tax domicile on Núñez de Balboa Street in Madrid, where it was neither located nor known” and that is why it maintained jurisdiction in Valladolid.

Faced with this divergence, the State Attorney's Office appealed to the Supreme Court, but the high court has already ruled in favor of Esgueva. The first time was in 2023 and on March 21 she reiterated the decision in another lawsuit – each tax for each period has its own inspection and results in different disputes. On this occasion it had been the representation of one of Esgueva's companies, Intercatia, exercised by lawyer Óscar Ovidio Casas, which had taken the case to the Supreme Court. He intended to annul one of the sentences that he lost, alleging that being inspected from another autonomous community left him defenseless.

According to the Supreme Court, the Treasury can decide which delegation inspects a taxpayer as long as it is duly justified because “this freedom of self-organization must be accompanied by the exercise of necessary administrative self-control.” “The phenomenon of self-integration of competition by the tax inspection is not questioned, but rather its materialization without the markers of the guarantees that, in each case, are required.” For everything, he agrees with Esgueva.

Esgueva's defense has already tried to transfer this decision to the macro-cause that the wind plot is investigating. In his defense brief, he argued that if the first inspection was not valid due to the delimitation of powers, the case should fall like a domino. His lawyer considered that this beginning “invariably vitiates or contaminates the rest of the case.” There is a basic principle of law, the doctrine of the fruit of the poisoned tree, according to which if the evidence that gives rise to a court case is annulled – a wiretapping, a confession… – the rest fall behind and the defense clings to that. For now, while waiting for the criminal case, Esgueva has managed to bend the arm of the Tax Agency.