They tricked individuals and businesses into renting their homes to them. But their goal was not to live there, but to transform them into tourist apartments without a permit, which they advertised on sites like Airbnb. This is how the prosecution describes an illegal tourist rental land, with extortion of funds against certain apartment owners, whose trial began this Monday in Barcelona. “Prepare to live in hell,” was one of the threats one of the accused made to a landlord.
The prosecution has placed ten people in the dock and is seeking sentences of five to nine years in prison for the offenses of criminal organization, fraud, falsification of documents, extortion and coercion. The highest sentences requested concern the father and son considered to be the leaders of the conspiracy. The fraud would have brought them profits of around 600,000 euros. The plot operated between 2017 and July 2020, when it was dismantled.
The lucrative activity of tourist apartments (now in the crosshairs of Barcelona City Hall, which wants to close them all) means that they end up becoming the target of criminal networks. This is the case of the conspiracy which bribed several municipal officials, a case already condemned. Other cases, like the one revealed by elDiario.es and studied by another Barcelona court, have even been imagined by economists.
The case that began to be judged this Monday in Section 7 of the Barcelona Court is a network of several companies, even if the mechanics of the fraud described by the prosecution (and which the defendants deny) is quite simple. In total, the indictment lists 48 affected homes, the majority in the Eixample district, belonging to both individuals and real estate agencies.
According to the prosecutor, the defendants presented the owners with “altered documents”, such as false pay slips and false employment contracts, in order to “appear financially solvent as tenants”. These were documents from inactive businesses created by the defendants themselves.
Once in the apartment, adds the prosecutor, the land has often paid the deposit and the first month’s rent, to immediately “carry out work in the accommodation without the knowledge of the owners”. The objective: to increase the number of rooms and rent them illegally to tourists, since the accommodation did not have a tourist license. The apartments were then advertised on Airbnb or on real estate portals like Idealista.
“If I have to kill you, I will kill you”
The prosecution emphasizes that the conspiracy was not limited to illegal tourist rentals (resulting in non-payment of rent to owners). This also created “a climate of terror” among the owners when they went to the apartments alerted by the neighbors due to the movement of tourists in the buildings and the noise they generated.
In the apartments, the defendants allegedly installed security cameras, with which they monitored the arrival of the owners. When they saw them, they quickly went to reprimand them, according to the prosecution. “They demanded that they leave the premises under the threat of causing them harm,” details the letter. Sometimes they even called the Mossos showing them the fake rental contracts to ask the police to evict the owners.
And they didn’t stay here. One of the accused, after being arrested during the dismantling of the land, allegedly threatened one of the owners by shouting “prepare to live in hell, if I have to kill you, I will kill you, but you will leave there” . The same afternoon, adds the prosecutor, two other defendants went to the apartment to change the lock, although a few days earlier, the property had given them 10,000 euros to leave the house.
The indictment cites at least one other case of extortion to leave the rented apartment. In this case, it was the homeowner who directly changed the lock on the house, which prompted two members of the branch to attempt to attack him, shouting “we’re going to kill you, you son of a bitch, if you don’t put it back not the house.” keys, we will break down the door.
One of these extortions, one of the defenses indicated during the handling of preliminary questions, should not be part of the trial since it has already been tried in another proceeding. This Monday’s session was resolved with unusual speed, with the parties proposing very few preliminary questions.
The defendants will testify at the end of the trial in two weeks. Beforehand, several agents of the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Guàrdia Urbana will parade before the court, in addition to the fifty victims of the plot. At the start of Monday’s hearing, the lawyer who represented some of them in a private prosecution announced that he was withdrawing, so the prosecution will be the only charge in the trial.
