Four years in prison for controversial lawyer Rodríguez Menéndez for a scam involving Argentine oil

The controversial Emilio Rodríguez Menéndez, who was one of the best-known lawyers in Spain for his relationship with celebrities and obscure cases, has been sentenced to four years in prison for serious fraud and professional intrusion, for having taken 120,000 euros from four people, whom he deceived with a false million-dollar oil deal from the Argentine company YPF. The Provincial Court of Madrid also condemns him because he posed as a practicing lawyer, when at the time of the events, at the end of 2014, he was suspended by the Madrid Bar Association. Rodríguez has previously been convicted of crimes of fraud against the Treasury and for distributing an intimate video of Pedro J. Ramírez, he has spent time in Spanish prisons and has been on the run in Argentina, where he founded a law firm in Buenos Aires, even though he could not practice there either. Rodríguez Menéndez began the affair until the scam in June 2014, when he lived between Madrid and Buenos Aires. That month, despite being suspended, he opened a law firm in Madrid, to whose inauguration he invited his victims. There he began to tell them “his projects to try to bring Argentine oil and its derivatives to Spain through a contract with YPF, thanks to “his contacts within the Government of the Argentine Republic,” according to the ruling. All free, of course, for friendship with the family. But money was needed for negotiations, and so he managed to get Isaac S. to give him 33,100 euros; that Ángel Luis E. provided him with another 37,500; and the couple Cristina R. and Jesús V. gave him another 33,100 euros. The business consisted of creating three companies in Argentina to be able to work with YPF and to channel “the sale and supply of oil to the state energy entity” through them. The supposed lawyer, it said, spent his life between Madrid and Buenos Aires, a circumstance that he took advantage of to defraud another 13,619 euros from his victims as alleged travel expenses. These companies were never established and the money, for the moment, has not appeared. The convicted lawyer denied in the trial that he had received money from his victims, but rather that it was he who had spent money “in inviting them and on trips.” He even went so far as to say that they “took advantage” of him. And he denied any legal commitment or representation on his part. As he did not provide invoices for the disbursements to his victims, Rodríguez clung to that thesis, which the judges of the Seventh Section of the Provincial Court of Madrid have rejected. Thus, in view of the documentation, the statements of witnesses, the investigations, the judges did not buy this excuse, and have sentenced him for aggravated fraud to three years in prison; to another year for usurpation of functions and professional intrusion, as well as the payment of 177,399 euros in compensation, a fine of 4,000 euros and partial payment of the costs. He has been acquitted of the crimes of forgery, money laundering, misappropriation, coercion and procedural fraud. This sentence can be appealed in cassation in the Supreme Court.Rodríguez Menéndez, who applied for Argentine citizenship, adds one more note to his record (despite the fact that his criminal record has been cancelled), the most famous line of which was the sentence to two years in prison in 2005 for having disseminated in 1997 a video with sexual content in which the privacy of the director of El Mundo, Pedro J. Ramirez. He then fled to Argentina, although he was arrested in 2006 when he tried to return in hiding to visit his mother. He was imprisoned and, that same year, the Supreme Court increased another sentence that already weighed on him from six to ten years for defrauding the Spanish Treasury of four million euros between 1990 and 1994. In August 2008, after spending several months in prison, he escaped again, taking advantage of a four-day leave.