Sloppy treatment of facts in Spain

[Perikles]

Hard to find a title for this thread, but I'm baffled by the case of the alleged involvement of Princess Cristina in the alleged fraud by her jerk of a very nice husband Urdangarin in the case of Nóos.

This article describes the claim of the court that PC sold 13 plots of land and/or houses to finance an expensive house, and she says that's all rubbish. None of the present owners of these plots claim they bought them from the Princess, and are baffled at being involved.

I find it incredible that such a state of affairs can exist. Either she did, and it's provable, or she didn't, in which case the judge is being an arsehole unwise in claiming the fact. How can there be such diametrically opposed views of a situation which must be absolutely clear?

In this case, the article relates that the judge Castro asked the hacienda for details of the princess's financial transactions, and they just downloaded any reference to her from their database. Then it goes on

La Agencia Tributaria no verifica la veracidad de estos datos, por lo que estos pueden contener errores o no estar actualizados correctamente, según las mismas fuentes.

So the judge is acting on information given by an official body which may or may not be correct. Do they care? Does anybody care? No checks were made on this information, and the judge is acting on it.

If this were limited to this one case, it might not be worth a mention. But it points to a general method of defence against any accusation of anything in this country, a blanket denial of everything with the expectation that nothing is provable or the facts reaching the judge are totally spurious.

Does anybody else find this weird?  Is the UK different?

[Nova]

Actually I find that rather alarming.  As you say, the sale of 13 properties should be provable one way or another.  What about land registry records?  I wouldn't be so certain that the required proofs haven't just been "mislaid" because of Cristina's privileged position as to feel confident in such a situation myself as a nobody who has submitted every declaration to Hacienda that I should have, but it does indicate a disturbing level of incompetence in the Spanish authorities....

[Perikles]

This issue is the lead article in El País today, which states that the judge is pissed off and demands more information.

It appears that the hacienda seems to be shrugging its corporate shoulder and saying that all they did was to pass on information given to them, which might or might not be incorrect and we couldn't care less.

La Agencia Tributaria publicó un comunicado en su página web, que desapareció horas después, en el que se autoexculpaba de cualquier error y en el que atribuía, de forma sutil, a notarios y registradores el fallo en la información y, por tanto, en las conclusiones sobre los bienes de la Infanta. "La información ha sido facilitada a la Agencia Tributaria por terceros", señalaba el escrito de Hacienda. Es decir, que la Agencia hizo un mero traslado de datos, entre los que se encuentran los aportados por notarios y registradores de la propiedad. El texto añadía además que los datos que figuran en el informe son los que reclamaron desde el juzgado y que estos no han sido objeto de "valoración jurídico-tributaria". "Por lo tanto, no cabe extraer directamente de los propios datos efectos ni consecuencias directas en materia jurídica tributaria", indicaba la nota, con lo que mantienen que Hacienda se ha limitado a recopilarlos sin llevar a cabo ningún procedimiento de validación.

Jesus H Christ - the court demands information in a court case of alleged fraud, and the hacienda happily delivers a possible pile of crap without verifying anything, and then passes the buck. How can you treat a judicial system seriously which operates like this?  Doesn't anybody do any homework?

[Perikles]

The hacienda is now saying that an error in using the DNI of the Princess may be at the root of the problem. No shit Sherlock. El País.

The hacienda points out that they have an awful lot of data to deal with, "cada año se reciben y procesan más de 1.000 millones de datos". Is that 1,000,000,000 bytes of information per year? That's nothing for a computer. And yet they can't do searches on a DNI without errors, 13 in this case. Somebody, or possibly everybody, wants shooting. Probably some software genius who couldn't programme a search on a DNI with the value 14.

[Janet]

An interesting perspective HERE?

[Janet]

The Consejo General del Notariado has said that the infanta was most definitely not the owner of any of the properties sold, and that the whole thing is a Hacienda error ...



... and now the Hacienda seems to have accepted that there was an error as a result of the information they received was "attributed to a DNI which "matched" doña Cristina's" ...

OK anyone have any idea how this could be? How can someone's individual and personal number match someone else's? Summat's going on, surely?

[Perikles]

OK anyone have any idea how this could be? How can someone's individual and personal number match someone else's? Summat's going on, surely?

Just a guess, which might be entirely wrong: She has a very unusual DNI of 00000014. If there is a faulty search on this number, the software might turn up erroneous hits. If the person doing the search enters, say, '14' instead of '00000014' then they might get a spurious hit on, say '45637614'. Something like that. Looks to me like a silly software bug. On the other hand, it would also be a matter of minutes to determine the connection between that DNI and those of the owners concerned. The fact that this hasn't happened means EITHER this is completely wrong OR they are even more stupid than you can imagine. 

The frightening thing is that this can have such consequences because nobody checked with the name. How much time would that have taken? 13 times 30 seconds? FFS 

Edit: After writing that, I read this comment which states that there seems to be no correlation with the DNIs involved and '14' other than expected by chance. So bang goes my theory. 

[Janet]

given the specific nature of this thread, I am bound to point out that the bloody hacienda thembloodyselves bloody well said there was a bloody match with the bloody DNIs! 

[Perikles]

Now, the head of the hacienda has made a public apology to the Royal House, but has no idea how it could have happened.

El País

If it had involved a normal person, I very much doubt there would have an admission of a cock-up, let alone an apology. 

[Janet]

On just that point, an apology has been forthcoming to a man called Antonio who had 900€ taken out of his bank account by the Hacienda for a traffic fine in Barcelona. Not from the minister though!

The reason for the apology? Antonio is an OAP born in Tenerife who has never even left the island, has not got a licence because he's never driven, and who had to fight tooth and nail to get the money back with the help of his nephew ... because Antonio can't read and write.

Added to the refund was 20% compensation. Big deal. How can such a mistake be made?

I'm sorry I can't give a source for this because it's just one from a police feed, but that does mean it's genuine.