The Provincial Court of Madrid will begin this Monday, October 13, the trial against Toño Sanchís, former representative of Belén Esteban, for the television collaborator for several years. Last Friday in prison for these events. The Public Ministry also requests that ASG compensate the affected company, Bem Imaging SL, with 339,549 euros, which is the part obtained illegally and that Sanchís has not yet returned, and to pay a fine of 3,600 euros. Bem Imaging SL is a company managed by , which is the injured party in the process, according to data collected from the Commercial Registry and as legal sources have confirmed to the Efe agency.
The Prosecutor’s brief for the trial maintains that the accused committed a continuous crime of misappropriation between 2009 and 2015. It was in December 2015 when he broke off his employment relationship with Toño Sanchís after finding alleged irregularities in his accounts. A separation between the representative – whose client list included other famous people, such as Terelu Campos, Álvaro Muñoz Escassi or Ylenia Padilla – and the represented person, who also maintained a friendship, very popular and which took up several hours of television, especially in save mewhere Esteban was a collaborator. For example, Esteban said that when collecting invoices and documentation he found that for certain jobs he had not been paid anything or had received much less than what was agreed upon. “I have been trying to recover what is mine for years and it has been impossible because he says he is insolvent, but this is already in the hands of my lawyers and I am going for him (…) He will not leave this world without giving me back what is mine,” Esteban recently said on a television program.
The Prosecutor’s Office relates in its brief that on May 13, 2009, a contract was signed between the injured party, who was acting in her own name and on behalf of Producciones Bem SL (which exploited her image rights), and the Lorant Services Agency SL (dedicated to the activity of artistic representation). The defendant was a 50/50 partner in that agency, along with the person who signed that contract. Under the agreement, which was renewed annually, the artist designated the aforementioned agency as her exclusive representative for Spain and the world, so that the agency received payments for the work done by the client. Then, the agency paid the artist, who had to issue invoices through the company Bem Imaging SL, with the agreement that the agency charged 20% of the gross amount that the client had received.
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, “due to the trust existing between the parties”, it was the accused who prepared the invoices issued by the company Bem Imaging, SL to present them for collection to the agency, and took advantage of this situation to “obtain illicit financial enrichment.” He did so, he details, by applying a commission higher than the 20% stipulated in the contract, thus illegally obtaining a total of 362,248 euros, plus the corresponding VAT.
Once the contract ended, “and given the defendant’s refusal to account for his work,” a lawsuit was filed by the program collaborator and participant of realities as VIP Big Brotherof Ben Imaging SL and Producciones Bem SL, against the service agency Lorant, SL, demanding the delivery of that amount. The claim was upheld in its entirety by a ruling by a court in Torrejón de Ardoz and, therefore, the agency was ordered to pay a total of 388,868 euros. But the defendant did not pay and the plaintiff only managed to recover 49,318 euros in cash and another 375,000 euros for the award of a home in the Madrid town of Villanueva del Pardillo that “was encumbered with an unpaid mortgage of more than 200,000 euros,” details the Prosecutor’s Office.
