National
Luis Roldán released, but where is the money?
By h.b. - Mar 19, 2010 - 7:38 AM
email this article
Luis Roldán shopping in Zaragoza during a prison pass in 2004 - EFE
The ex Director of the Guardia Civil has served 15 years in prison found guilty of diverting 1.7 billion pesetas to his bank accounts
Luis Roldán, the ex head of the Guardia Civil, will sign his prison release papers today, having spent 15 years inside. It was his corrupt activity which is thought to have been partly responsible for the fall of the Felipe González Government in 1996.
He was originally sentenced to 31 years in prison for bribery, falsification of documents, mis-use of public funds, blackmail and tax crimes. But thanks to legal reforms and a five year reduction in the sentence for good behaviour, his time was reduced to 15 years, ten of which he served in a special wing of the women’s prison in Brieva, Ávila.
For the last years of the punishment he was transferred to Zaragoza prison, but he was granted an open policy, which meant that he only had to sleep in prison, working by day as an insurance salesman, until his recent retirement.
Now aged 66 life begins again for the man who went missing after diverting money, some 1.7 billion pesetas, away from the special reserve funds, money of which an estimated 10 million € remains whereabouts unknown. He was finally found and arrested in Thailand in 1995, and investigators managed to trace the money to a Swiss bank account, but then lost it after it was transferred to Singapore, a country which refused to collaborate with Spain on the matter.
In prison Roldan has also married for a third time, to a Russian bride he met on the Internet. In a newspaper interview recently he claimed not to have made off with a single peseta, but he still owns a luxury flat next to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and another property in San Bartolomé in the French Antilles, valued at 3.7 million €.
Speaking on the morning of his release Roldán said he did not understand why the police ‘never made the smallest effort to find or follow the money’. He said he had never had any contact with Paesa, whom he said he thought must be protected.