Three years in prison for bank employee who misappropriated more than 300,000 euros from customers
The Provincial Court of Cáceres has sentenced to three years and three months in prison a Santander collaborating agent who took 258,358 euros from customer accounts.
He has been sentenced for a continuous offence of misappropriation of articles 74.1 and 2 and 253.1 in relation to article 250.2 of the Penal Code.
In total, he kept 337,293 euros. He and his father returned part of it, leaving 258,358 euros in the defendant’s possession.
The sentence is already final, because it is in conformity.
The facts occurred between 2012 and 2018 in a Santander branch in El Cañaveral (Cáceres), when the convicted person, with the intention of unlawfully increasing his wealth, extracted various amounts of money from twelve bank accounts of different customers.
The case comes from the Court of First Instance and Preliminary Investigation number 3 of Cáceres. Prior to the initiation of the proceedings, in September 2018, the convicted person acknowledged the facts to Banco Santander in a written statement.
The mitigating factors of partial reparation of the damage were applied to him, as he returned almost 80,000 euros, and the analogous mitigating factor of confession.
The bank, which has brought the private prosecution, paid all the damaged customers the amounts that this employee had at his disposal and did not return.
In addition to the prison sentence, the convicted person will have to pay a fine of 1,080 euros and compensate Santander with 258,358.42 euros, plus interest.
The sentence
Handed down on 6 June (128/2023), was signed by the judges Joaquín González Casso (president and rapporteur), Valentín Pérez Aparicio and Julia Domínguez Domínguez.
The defendant was defended by the lawyer José Felipe Criado Navarro and Santander by Carlos Galeano Hergueta.
“The defendant was a collaborating agent of the bank, he was not an employee, and at various times in his life, he made fraudulent withdrawals from his clients’ accounts. Banco Santander, as could not be otherwise, the first thing it did was to replace the money, and in the face of facts of that calibre, which were perfectly accredited, filed a complaint against this gentleman,” the bank’s lawyer, Carlos Galeano, managing partner of the Galeano Hergueta Abogados law firm in Extremadura, told Confilegal.
He points out that when the bank found out that these anomalies were taking place in the collaborating agency, it sent its team there to carry out an internal audit, and finally this person “had no choice but to acknowledge the facts in view of the evidence that the bank had and the report it produced”.
