The National Court issued a prison order yesterday (Monday) for Santiago Fuentes, for the so-called Arbistar case two and a half years after his arrest. The end of the investigation and, above all, the fact that only "a tiny amount" of the almost 100 million euros that has ‘disappeared into thin air’ has been recovered, influenced the judge’s decision.
Judge Calama, head of the Investigating Court Number 4 of the National Court, said that in his opinion the risk of Fuentes fleeing the country is greater for these reasons, as he is considered to be the mastermind behind the biggest cryptocurrency scam in the history of not just Tenerife, but the whole of Spain, that operated out of offices in the Zentral Centre in Playa Las Americas in the south of the island.
Although Fuentes was arrested in the first week of October 2020, until now he had remained on probation with his passport confiscated and the prohibition to leave the country and the obligation to sign at a judicial headquarters on the 1st and 15th of every month.
However, the practical completion of the investigation phase has significantly increased the risk of him fleeing, which is why Calama responded to the request made both by the Prosecutor's Office and by several of the injured parties and decreed his admission to prison.
In his 22-page order, the magistrate proposes to try Santiago Fuentes, and six other people, for crimes of being members of a criminal organization and fraud, with a possible sentence of 123 million euros. The amount allegedly defrauded plus one-third established by law.
The Arbistar case has left more than 32,000 victims in just 16 months from Spain to Iran, Bulgaria, Colombia or Argentina, among other countries to the tune of 92 million euros traced so far, according to the aforementioned judge, which gives an idea of the considerable scale of the scandal they are uncovering.
