Juan Collado: Andorra maintains more than 100 million euros seized from Peña Nieto’s lawyer

Juan Ramón Collado, known as the lawyer of the powerful Mexicans for having defended prominent men of the Latin American country such as former president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has more than 100 million euros seized in Andorra since 2015. This is clear from confidential reports to which EL PAÍS has had access and which outline an intricate circuit of accounts in Andorra with branches in Holland, Panama and Hong Kong.

Collado, 60, turned to a complex racket to move his fortune. Its structure was channeled first through the deposits of Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) and then Crèdit Andorrà. And it served to mask a flow of funds that could have belonged to Mexican political leaders, according to Andorran investigators.

The balance sheets confirm that the influential lawyer had at least two accounts in his name in Andorra in March 2023 with 18.9 million euros. And that he managed the rest of his assets in the Pyrenean country through Dutch instrumental companies (without activity). These are the companies Marathon Corporation CV (with which he controlled 30.9 million), Constellation Investments CV (44.9 million), Diamond Corporation CV (5.7) and Kayser Investments (474,336 euros). Collado allegedly used this scheme as a cover to reinforce the shielding of his identity.

The man who was Peña Nieto’s lawyer did not have the money idle and invested more than half of his assets in Andorra (56.4 million) in variable income funds and shares of companies such as Volkswagen, Apple, Disney or BASF, according to the extracts of the accounts to which this newspaper has had access.

In parallel with the siege against Collado, the Andorran justice system has focused on its most direct environment. Stephanie García, judge investigating this money laundering case named Operation Jet, Last year, he ordered the indictment for this crime of Jaime Jesús Sánchez Montemayor, Collado’s alleged straw man, partner of his law firm in Mexico Collado y Asociados SA de CV (Variable Capital Stock Company) and in charge of authorizing payments in the scheme. lawyer’s finances, according to investigators.

Antoni Riestra, Collado’s lawyer in Andorra, maintains that his client’s assets in the Pyrenean country are justified and denies that Sánchez Montemayor – who appeared before the BPA as director of the firm Libertad Servicios Financieros SA de CV and said that he managed four companies of the investigated lawyer – has acted as a front man. He also indicates that in the coming months he will work to file the judicial investigation for money laundering against his client in Andorra and lift the embargo on the more than 100 million euros that he has in a skein of accounts at Crèdit. Andorra. In his statement before the judge of the European country, Collado linked his fortune in Andorra – a country shielded until 2017 by banking secrecy – with the professional activity of his law firm and the business of the Prenda Oro pawnshop chain that his father created. in 1999.

In the battery of new investigations, the instructor has also requested that five instrumental companies connected to the opaque Collado racket be investigated. Among them is the Curacao (Netherlands) company Protostar Private Foundation.

With this movement, the judge wants to tighten the fence on the lawyer’s family environment. And, for this reason, it has requested to incorporate into the investigation a report from the Financial Intelligence Unit of Andorra (Uifand), the small country’s organization dedicated to combating money laundering, which is investigating the sister of the lawyer Lucía Collado Mocelo, 55 years old. , and his brother-in-law, Mario Andrade Manzana, 56.

The judge mentions 10 new companies based in Holland, Panama and Hong Kong that were used to move the flow of funds under suspicion. Collado stated that he modified his structure in Andorra after a robbery at the BPA representative office in Mexico, where a USB memory with confidential client information disappeared.

Salary for the front man of $90,000 per month

The new documents incorporated into the judicial case, which exceeds 24,000 pages, reveal the close relationship Collado-Montemayor. The first paid the second a salary of up to 90,000 dollars per month (about 83,000 euros) and a bonus of 260,000 per quarter for his supposed professional services.

From his Andorran corporate shed, Collado shelled out money for a life of luxury. He bought two Cessna Citation 650 and Bombardier Challenger aircraft for 5.2 million, and bought three apartments at the St. Regis Bal Harbor in Miami (USA). The lawyer also acquired a library in his house in 2009 for 1.3 million through one of his Andorran accounts.

Collado’s fortune in Andorra, where he managed 24 accounts at the BPA between 2006 and 2015, received its first jolt in March of that last year. At that time, coinciding with the intervention of the BPA for the alleged laundering of funds from criminal groups such as the Odebrecht bribery network or the plot of former Chavista leaders who looted 2,000 million dollars from Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PDVSA), the authorities of the Principality froze the money of the lawyer of the powerful. The reason: they understood that he could not justify the origin of his funds.

The investigation was provisionally archived in 2018 after the Mexican Prosecutor’s Office under the last stretch of Peña Nieto’s six-year term sent reports to Andorra exonerating the lawyer. The documentation, which claimed that the case had already been tried, forced the European country to provisionally file the case as it could not prove the illicit origin of the money.

The shelving was not without controversy. And Andorra connected the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) of Mexico – the name of what is known today as the Prosecutor’s Office – with a maneuver to provisionally bury the case and save the funds of this man close to the PRI.

In July 2019, the case suffered another unforeseen turn. The arrest of Collado in a restaurant in Mexico City by agents of the Prosecutor’s Office for money laundering allowed the Andorran justice system to reopen the case. The arrest, which occurred during the mandate of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, resulted, once again, in the seizure of the lawyer’s funds in Andorra.

Collado took advantage of the provisional file of the case to transfer 10.5 million from Andorra to a BBVA account in Madrid six days before his arrest. The outflow of funds coincides in time with the purchase of a 233-square-meter apartment in Madrid in the mega-luxury complex of the Four Seasons hotel valued at five million dollars, as revealed by an investigation by this newspaper.

The Andorran investigations against Collado join other judicial proceedings that have affected the influential lawyer in his native country. Last February, a federal judge acquitted the lawyer of an investigation for money laundering and organized crime linked to the alleged simulated sale of a property owned by the financial services company Caja Libertad. The decision forced the release of the lawyer, who had been in prison since July 2019. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called the Mexican judiciary “rotten” after learning of the defender’s release.

Along with Peña Nieto, Collado has had Pemex union leader Carlos Romero Deschamps in his client portfolio; to the former governor of Quintana Roo Mario Villanueva (PRI); or Raúl Salinas de Gortari, businessman and brother of the former president of Mexico Carlos Salinas de Gortari.