Andorra seized 48,000 million pesos from 23 Mexican entrepreneurs and investors

The judicial authorities of Andorra – a small country in the north of Spain – about two billion euros or 48 billion pesos were confiscated, supposedly belonging to 23 Mexican businessmen and investors. This in the context of an operation against money laundering and an international investigation against financial fraud.

Juan Ramon Collado, the newspaper says Day, is the linchpin of all this research. This is the “power of attorney” that worked with former Mexican presidents such as Carlos Salinas de Gortari or Enrique Peña Nieto. The seized money was deposited into bank accounts that were part of the funds of the Private Bank of Andorra (BPA), a financial institution that has intervened since 2015 due to the alleged illegality of its operations.

Andorra was the “tax haven” for politicians and businessmen during the Peña Nieto government (2012-2018), who were convinced by the offers of BPA executives to manage large amounts of money with total “discretion” and even opacity to avoid regulatory authorities, says the medium.

The identity of those involved is so far unknown. But as he said Day an official of the judiciary, “between them there is a clear bond or nexus of union, namely the lawyer Juan Collado.” From each of the 23 Mexicans examined, between five and 150 million euros were seized. It is suspected that they have all used BPA to launder money from organized crime and political corruption, and that they have decided to take their money to that bank precisely to take advantage of the limited controls.

Lawyer, Juan Collado, who has been imprisoned for more than a year in the Northern prison in Mexico City, charged with organized crime in the form of operations involving means of illicit origin, trade barriers, fraud and embezzlement; was able to act as prestanombres in Andorra to mobilize millions of dollars.

Collado Mocelo would have moved $ 120 million between 2006 and 2015 through 23 accounts in the Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA), as revealed by a confidential report from that country’s police, dated February 2020, to which the Spanish newspaper had access The country.

According to the document Collado Mocelo received 90 million dollars in Andorra from accounts of the Mexican currency exchange Tiber and trust companies such as the Fidemont group, before being deposited into the BPA accounts; for the detectives it is therefore proof that the lawyer had large amounts of cash at his disposal.

The investigation causes Collado Mocelo to resort to barter houses and trust companies to make tracing the origin of the funds difficult., so -for the police- Some of that money may come from the lawyer himself or from a figurehead (borrow names).

“Part of the money received (in the BPA by Collado) it could have originated in criminal activity, taking into account the nature of the person under investigation and their influences in the spheres of power “, the document warns.

The Andorran police – who have been investigating the Mexican lawyer for alleged money laundering since 2015 – assures that Juan Collado did not provide receipts for his transactions through the exchange offices, documents that these companies are required to provide and that allow the lawyer to verify the origin of the money.

The police report points to a transfer of $ 372,349 in June 2013 from one of the holding companies of the Tiber stock exchange in the BPA to a Collado account managed by a Dutch company.

Thereafter, the then head of the BPA in Mexico, Joan March Masson, instructed an employee by mail to send the money to an encrypted Collado account in order to “hide the true beneficiary of the money”, the Spanish medium emphasizes.

In 2016 Juan Collado himself assured an Andorran judge that most of the money came from the profits of a chain of pawnshops his father had founded in the 1990s. and which would have earned him $ 84 million in interest income in 14 years.

The newspaper recalled that an investigation into the Mexican lawyer for money laundering has been ongoing in Andorra since 2015, after the BPA intervened for allegedly laundering money from criminal groups.

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