The National Court has confirmed the case file that investigated for eight years whether within the SGAE there was a fraudulent system, called “the wheel”, to collect millions of euros in royalties from songs broadcast at dawn on television. The Criminal Chamber, as elDiario.es has been able to verify, has rejected the appeal filed by the Professional Organization of Music Publishers (OPEM), one of the popular accusations, and confirms the dismissal of the case. Various cases heard by the National Court in recent years regarding the management of the SGAE have resulted in archives or acquittals, such as the case of the former managers accused of alleged embezzlement of funds from the entity.
The “wheel” affair broke out in June 2017 with the arrest of 18 people linked to the General Society of Spanish Authors (SGAE). A police operation led by the National Court that investigated authors, publishers and public and private television channels for allegedly creating a system for broadcasting “slightly” modified songs at dawn and irregularly generating royalties. The weight of these nighttime performances, before legal limitations and the SGAE itself, reached 50% of the income of the entire grill.
The case spent eight years in the investigation phase before the Ismael Moreno Court of the National Court, with a list of defendants that included José Miguel Fernández Sastrón, then president of the SGAE, and the composers and producers Fernando Bermúdez, Rafael Tena and Manuel Carrasco Tubio, as well as a dozen television channels under the magistrate’s microscope: some public, such as RTVE, Telemadrid or EITB, and others private, such as Atresmedia or Mediaset. Some paid bail of up to 100,000 euros to avoid pretrial detention.
The Prosecutor’s Office went from promoting the complaint that triggered the case to requesting its archives in the middle of this year, something Judge Moreno did in the last days of last April. “There is insufficient evidence to prove that the persons investigated engaged in conduct that constitutes the criminal offenses of which they are accused,” the investigator in charge of the case said in his order. A few weeks later, he confirmed his own decision, leaving the case in the hands of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court.
This body, as elDiario.es learned, confirmed the file, rejecting the appeal of OPEM, which in turn supported the SGAE itself, requesting that the case be reopened and that the accused be prosecuted and brought to justice. The judge, the Chamber affirms, “faithfully respected the established legality” and there is not enough evidence to bring the twenty or so accused to justice according to the “wheel” system, which, according to the National Court, was not criminal.
Possible appeal to the Supreme Court
In its appeal supported by the SGAE, the Editors’ Organization explained that, in its view, the accused should have been sent to court and tried, not exonerated. There had been, according to them, a “clear change in the market” and “clear favourable treatment”. The musical works, according to this accusation, were broadcast in the night slot, ceding their rights to television “under the subterfuge of a publishing contract that does not meet its objective”, since they were broadcast “at zero cost” or “turnkey”. “hand”. “Disproportionate economic rights” were generated, it says, compared to other songs that were not affected by this operation.
The appeal even pointed out a crime of corruption between individuals, knowing that this flow of money could be considered a “gift”, which both the Prosecutor’s Office and the Criminal Division of the National Court categorically reject. “This cannot be assimilated”, the judges explained, to the criminal notion of a gift, which generally includes a material or economic gift made to someone in exchange for something. Furthermore, in this case, the money circulated between companies and not between people. The case file can still be appealed before an additional instance: the Criminal Division of the Supreme Court.
The prosecution supported the dismissal of the case, acknowledging that “a significant number of works have been published without yet being registered with the SGAE” but without “objective data” which “allows us to maintain” the existence of a corrupt and irregular network surrounding these payments and rights.
Three years ago, another criminal case opened against SGAE and its management ended in acquittal. It was this case that brought Eduardo “Teddy” Bautista and nine other people to trial accused of embezzling funds from the entity, with the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office requesting sentences of up to twelve and a half years in prison in the most serious cases. All the contracts at issue in the trial, the National Court specified at the time, “were known, adopted and approved by the management bodies of both companies, with prior and full knowledge of the contractual conditions, with the approval of the annual budget by the budgets of SGAE”, which was the final beneficiary of the contracted products.
