Too obvious to be fabricated, too suspicious to be taken for granted, San Chin Choon’s role in the mask case has gone from quaint to key. Does the Malaysian businessman exist? And if so, is it really he who orders the manufacture of the masks in China and pays the commissions to Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño? The search of the house and Luceño’s office last week tries to clarify it.
Alberto Luceño alleges that San Chin Choon, owner of a company called Leno and based in Kuala Lumpur, set the price of the material sold to the City Council, charged and deducted a commission for himself and the “facilitator” of the operation, Luis Medina. . According to that thesis, refuted by the Prosecutor’s Office, there is no possible scam because neither he nor Medina adulterated the price of the material or imposed their commissions that they gave to later buy sports cars, yachts and even a luxury apartment in Pozuelo.
The truth is that the 11 million euros of public money left an account of the Madrid City Council in Bankinter to another in the name of the Leno company, in the Malaya Banking Berghard. And later, from that account, transfers were made to those of Luceño (5 million) and Medina (1 million) in Spain, according to the documentation of the summary. The City Council never denounced the scam, until Anticorruption filed the complaint and appeared as injured.
There are too many aspects of Luceño’s thesis that do not fit the researchers. In his statement before the judge, the commission agent said that San Chin Choon does not speak English and that he has only seen him once, in 2018, when he allegedly signed as Leno’s exclusive agent, a fact that should prove documentation in which, according to the Prosecutor’s Office and judge have forged signatures and dates.
In these four years, Luceño has been related to San Chin Choon through a certain “Anthony”, a Chinese citizen who does speak English and who is not really called that, but who has adopted that Anglo-Saxon given name for, as is customary, among the nationals of the Asian giant, to facilitate their dealings with Westerners.
In Anthony could lie the key to the San Chin Choon mystery, if the supposed Chinese intermediary does not become, on the contrary, an additional mystery in the case. The records of the house and the Takamaka company yielded several surprises, such as the false CNI badge that Luceño kept or the printing of cards from other organizations, such as the National Security Directorate or the National Police. But also the discovery of a webchat with Anthoy from the Spanish commission agent, who is being investigated for aggravated fraud, false documents and money laundering.
Will Luceño and Anthony refer to San Chin Choon in that exchange of messages? Will it make it clear whether the Malaysian is truly a businessman or a straw man? At the moment, only the record is recorded in the summary with an inventory of what the agents found of possible use for the investigation and next Tuesday the unsealing of everything seized on Thursday, September 22, is set in court.
The letter in which the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office argues the need for Luceño’s records, the Public Ministry reiterates and expands its position on the scam. Prosecutor Luis Rodríguez Sol sought to find “messages exchanged with those responsible for the Leno company that help to understand what the real relations of the person under investigation were with them: if he and Mr. Medina really were exclusive agents or not of that company, how they were determined the commissions that were going to be charged, how the amount that was refunded for the perception of gloves of lower quality than expected was set, why the initially agreed commissions were modified, etc…”
But the key to the prosecutor’s accusation against Medina and Luceño is mentioned by the prosecutor below: “And, above all, to what extent Mr. Luceño misrepresented those data [lo previamente acordado con fabricante y proveedor] in their communications with those responsible for the Madrid City Council, since this would have consisted of deception as a typical element of the scam.
The mask case started when the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office opened investigative proceedings in November 2020 based on a report from the Money Laundering Prevention Service (Sepblac), in turn alerted by the banks of the strong income that they had suddenly received. received Luceño and Medina.
Six months later, in May 2021, Anti-Corruption approached the Malaysian authorities to request their cooperation for the first time in obtaining San Chin Choon’s declaration, something they reiterated in November of that same year. When on March 31, 2022, elDiario.es revealed the existence of an investigation –secret to all except those investigated and the Madrid City Council–, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office was still waiting for a satisfactory response from Malaysia.
By then, the response to the Spanish request had come out of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Asian country, although it was received in April. In the letter, the head of the International Crime Unit of the Malaysian Prosecutor’s Office, Ramesh Gopalan, explained that he had managed to locate San Chin Choon and required his collaboration, but that he had availed himself of his right not to testify, according to to the legislation of the country.
The 19 Anticorruption questions remained unanswered and Luceño and Medina’s alibi to try to justify their commissions and deny the deception vanished. But last July, the email account of court number 47 in Madrid registered a message in its inbox that increased the mystery: someone who identified himself as the Malaysian businessman corrected the authorities of his country and assured that he had come the Malaysian police to answer the 19 questions.
The businessman claimed that his “sworn” statement was produced on April 18, 2022, a date after the response sent by the Malaysian prosecutor to Spain. In his message to the court, the alleged San Chin Choon said he did not understand why that statement was not forwarded to Spain and added that he had testified again before the same “oath commissioner.” In his message to the court, he attached the 19 answers that he had allegedly given to the rogatory commission of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
In those answers there was an explanation for everything that Medina, Luceño and San Chin Choon himself had done: the Malaysian businessman set the price of the material, agreed on the commissions with Luceño, Medina only acted as a “facilitator” and the alleged forgery of signatures and dates responds only to a bug with the templates.
If everything San Chin Choon said were true, there would be no case of masks. But to this day, Judge Adolfo Carretero continues to refer to the person who sent that email in July as “alleged” San Chin Choon and the two Spanish commission agents are still charged. Judge Adolfo Carretero has warned the sender that if he wants to testify he has to come to Spain, that he is not going to organize a videoconference from Kuala Lumpur. San Chin Choon has said that he cannot travel for “work reasons” and has reiterated his offer to go to the Spanish diplomatic delegation on specific dates, unable to prove in his case if he is who he says he is.
Back from the August holidays, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office decided to intervene in the mess. The prosecutor Luis Rodríguez Sol wrote a letter to the court requesting the entry and search of the address and one of the companies of Alberto Luceño in search of the truth about San Chin Choon, some proceedings that he had decided not to propose in the six months of the case since he came to court. It was about delving into the thesis that Luceño himself is actually behind that email.
The judge formed a secret piece whose existence was not known until the secrecy of it was lifted last week, once the records were made. The piece opens with the prosecutor’s letter justifying his request, but it also serves to reveal the insistence of the Public Ministry that, with or without San Chin Choon, there are sufficient reasons to accuse Luceño and Medina of fraud and other crimes.
The suspicions about the origin of the mail include a grammatical analysis of it by the Prosecutor’s Office. Rodríguez Sol explains that to refer to the “defenselessness” of those under investigation, the author has used the term “indenfension”, instead of “defencelessness”. It is one of the grammatical errors by which the prosecutor senses that the email sent to the court has been written “by someone who not only does not speak English correctly, but also has Spanish as their mother tongue.”
Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño are accused of the crimes of aggravated fraud in competition with one of false documents, money laundering and asset concealment. Proving the crime of fraud is vital for the case to prosper. Only the money laundering offense requires that the funds come from a predicate offence, fraud in this case. The lifting of assets would also decline without fraud.
On the other hand, the popular accusation resorted to the Provincial Court before the judge’s refusal to attribute a fiscal crime to those investigated, but it has said that there are still no indications for it and that it will attend to what a pending report from the Tax Agency collects. .
For all these reasons, it is so relevant for the instruction to prove the fraud with a view to putting the two investigated, alone or in the company of alleged foreign collaborators, on the bench for that and the rest of the crimes.
In his brief, the prosecutor recalls the emails in which Luceño and Medina celebrate the commissions with a “Pa’la saca!”. “It reveals the awareness of those under investigation that they are taking advantage of the situation of need and indigence of the citizens and that they are profiting in an exaggerated and unjustified way at their expense,” writes Luis Rodríguez Sol.
