Perpetrator of one of Spain’s largest real estate frauds found hiding under kitchen sink in his mother’s house

Hiding in a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink at his mother’s house. That is where Spanish Civil Guard officers found Carlos García Roldán, known as Charly, who had been sentenced to nearly 15 years in prison for perpetrating the largest real estate fraud in the Balearic Islands and one of the biggest on record in all of Spain.

García Roldán had been on the run since last December after the Provincial Court of the Balearic Islands found him guilty of scamming 240 people out of a collective €3.3 million ($3.8 million) by promising to build homes that never got under way. This is the second time that the businessman has fled justice: in 2018 he went missing for over a year when complaints began piling up against him in the courts. He was eventually located in Colombia.

Sources familiar with the investigation told EL PAÍS that the Civil Guard had strong suspicions that Charly was hiding at his mother’s house in Calella, in Barcelona province, after he failed to show up for a hearing at the Provincial Court last December to find out when he would start serving his prison sentence.

Officers deployed a discreet surveillance operation near the mother’s home to try to document García Roldán’s presence in the building. But the fugitive never left the apartment. His relatives were the ones who went in and out of the building to buy supplies, while García Roldán stayed shut inside to avoid being captured.

Apparently he did not want to repeat the mistakes that led to his capture in Colombia in February 2019, a country he had fled to in March 2018 when the fraud complaints were closing in on him. In the town of Buga, in the Valle del Cauca department, he hid in his girlfriend’s grandmother’s home. According to what his partner later told the Civil Guard, the fugitive spent his days in town, going to the gym and running errands with the elderly woman.

During those months he lost more than a dozen kilos and changed his hair color from the vivid blond he had in his days as a real-estate agent in Palma de Mallorca. It was those walks and outings that finally allowed authorities to identify and arrest him in an operation coordinated between Spain’s Civil Guard and Colombia’s National Police. On that occasion, it was his girlfriend who tipped off the authorities.

This time around, law enforcement asked the court for a warrant to enter and search the home, which they did early in the morning. After entering the apartment, officers found the fugitive hiding in the cabinet under the kitchen sink and proceeded to arrest him.

In its ruling, the court found that the real-estate agency created by García Roldán, Lujocasa, did not have the means to carry out its activity because it lacked its own funds and had no external financing. The 240 victims ended up handing over down payments that ranged from €5,000 to more than €100,000, totaling €3,382,529, for off-plan properties. They were told that Lujocasa was going to develop 30 housing projects in various parts of Mallorca, a popular destination where home prices are among Spain’s most expensive.

All the money went instead into the pockets of the fraudster, who is known to have spent the funds mainly on jewelry, cars, travel and nights at the Casino de Mallorca, where he squandered more than €270,000 in almost 300 visits. The judge ordered the members of the scheme, which included other real estate agents and an architect, to compensate more than a hundred of the victims with over €2 million in damages.

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