First major conviction of the iDental leadership: prison for Social Security fraud

The old leadership of iDental has suffered a first and overwhelming setback. The National Court has sentenced the former owners of the group of dental clinics to sentences of up to five years in prison, in addition to imposing large fines, for fraud of more than 25 million euros. The court has considered proven that six of the seven defendants (Antonio Javier García Pellicer, Vicente Castañer Blasco, Luis Sans Huecas, José Luis González Sánchez and the brothers José María and Juan Garrido López) designed a plot of “misleading artifices” and “maneuvers fraudulent” to not pay Social Security for years.

This has been the first great cause that has seated the iDental ex-cups on the bench of the National Court. But they still have more pending accounts to judge. In 2019, the investigating magistrate José de la Mata also prosecuted the six now convicted, along with 29 other people, for creating two different “criminal organizations” focused, on the one hand, on diverting money from financial loans and, on the other, of defective treatments provided to customers. In 2018, the group of clinics closed without warning, leaving thousands of patients stranded, who saw their treatments interrupted or not even started. As concluded by the UDEF (Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit) of the Police, for years companies were “decapitalized” and their funds were diverted.

At the moment, as stated in the sentence signed this Friday, the National Court already considers it proven that there was, at least, a Social Security fraud and that this lasted, at least, from 2015 to 2018. Regardless of whether the group business changed hands. In this sense, the magistrates stress that Antonio Javier García Pellicer and Vicente Castañer Blasco were the owners of the network of companies until October 2017, when they were replaced by Luis Sans Huecas and the brothers José María and Juan Garrido López. With all of them, the dynamic of “defaults and deceptive artifices” persisted, according to the court.

For this reason, the judges impose three years in prison and a fine of 25 million euros on García Pellicer and Castañer Blanco, to whom they attribute a Social Security fraud of 8.5 million. For their part, Sans Huecas and the Garrido López brothers are sentenced to five years in prison and pay 55 million, since fraud in their time exceeded 18 million. González Sánchez, who served as the company’s administrator, is sentenced to two years and six months in prison as a necessary collaborator.

Regarding Sans Huecas and the Garrido López brothers, the three buyers of the dental clinics in 2017, the National Court emphasizes that they never had an “intention to pay the debt” with Social Security that the group had, “more than what is strictly necessary to continue to run the business” and “continue to make a profit while the debt mounted”. “They went ahead with the preconceived fraudulent plan, increasing that debt in less than a year to more than 18 million euros,” the judges add.