BarcelonaAlmost twelve years have passed since the activist of Vilanova and Geltrú Enric Duran planted the Court of Barcelona at the beginning of his case for having obtained 492,000 euros from banking entities. Now, however, as reported The Directthe Catalan, known as the Robin Hood of banks, has been arrested in France for an alleged cryptocurrency exchange operation with a person connected to an e-commerce fraud. The arrest took place on June 12 and, since then, he has been in pre-trial detention at the Osny-Pontoise penitentiary, just 40 kilometers from Paris.
This same week – between September 27 and 30 – Duran will go to the courts of justice in Nanterre accused of a crime of money laundering. Specifically, according to the medium cited, the user would have obtained the money by selling products over the internet which he then did not send. Enric Duran assures that he was not aware of the origin of the investment: “The client lied to me saying that he wanted to invest in bitcoin the income from his e-commerce business. The lies continued from beginning to end.”
In a letter sent to the media, the activist claims that his arrest is an attempt to “criminalize” cryptocurrency transactions and that his arrest is more linked to his past than this crime. “Without my record as the Robin Hood of banks, I would not have spent these months in prison. With the experience of the interrogation, one might believe that the French police were more interested in finding a reason to incriminate me than in the truth,” he says.
492,000 euros between 39 entities
The nickname of the Robin Hood of the banks is not the result of chance: between 2006 and 2008, Duran took out credits worth 492,000 euros with 39 different banking entities with no intention of paying them back. In fact, the activist allocated each and every one of these euros to social initiatives. This led to him being reported by a bunch of banks. The cause could never prosper because Duran went into exile and was in an unknown whereabouts. The crimes became statute-barred last year, so they can no longer be charged.
During the trial – which was left on wet paper due to Duran’s departure into exile -, the Prosecutor’s Office and up to 16 private prosecutions representing different banks asked for eight years in prison for the Catalan for a continuing crime of falsifying commercial documents and of a punishable insolvency crime. Duran, when he asked for the credits, had pretended, among other things, to be a commercial or IT director and made false payrolls to prove it.
Source: www.ara.cat
