After more than two years on the run from justice, as confirmed by his lawyer, Francisco Miranda, to the EFE agency. Grueso, who was sentenced to eight years in prison for embezzlement during his time at the head of the Niemeyer Center in Avilés (Asturias), was arrested in the town of Évora in compliance with a European arrest warrant. This Friday he was placed at the disposal of a court that gave its approval to his delivery to the Spanish authorities. Once this procedure has been completed, Grueso will be transferred to Spain “in a few days” to be admitted to prison, the lawyer said.
Justice sentenced Grueso in June 2020 in the Oviedo Court to a sentence of eight years in prison for continued crimes of embezzlement of public funds, document and corporate falsification during his management at the head of the Niemeyer Center in Avilés. The ruling was ratified by the Supreme Court in April 2023. Sources from the Superior Court of Justice of Asturias (TSJA) have confirmed that the Oviedo Court has already been informed of the arrest through the European police cooperation system.
The Civil Guard began the search for Grueso more than two years ago when it was found that his whereabouts were unknown after the Oviedo Court ordered his imprisonment, once the Supreme Court ratified his sentence. Already in February 2024, this same Court issued an international arrest warrant for the man who was general director of the Niemeyer de Avilés Foundation between 2006 and 2011.
The sentence by which he was convicted confirmed as proven facts that the cultural promoter generated expenses unrelated to the purposes of the cultural institution during the entire time that his employment relationship lasted, “disposing of his funds for the benefit of himself, his family, friends and third parties in his environment, as if they were his property, to the detriment of the Niemeyer Foundation.”
Aside from the sentencing of Grueso, the Supreme Court ratified the two-year prison sentence imposed on the former secretary of said Foundation, José Luis Rebollo, for continued corporate crime. The sentence imposed on the third defendant in the case, José María Vigil, former agent of Viajes El Corte Inglés, for embezzlement, falsehood and fraud was reduced from seven years and six months to six years in prison. According to the court ruling, Natalio Grueso, with the support of Vigil, with whom he had a friendship, also hid expenses for travel and hotel stays from family members and friends with false or altered invoices in the name of Foundation workers or for fictitious concepts.
The Asturias Prosecutor’s Office opposed the granting of the pardon requested by Grueso as it did not appreciate “reasons of justice, equity or public utility that could justify it.” After the trial held over six months in 2019, the Provincial Court acquitted Grueso’s ex-wife, Judith Pereiro, and the former Head of Production of the Niemeyer Center, Marc Martí, of a continued crime of embezzlement as an accomplice and a crime of embezzlement, respectively.
Friend of Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey
Grueso’s fate was almost premonitory in his debut novel, The loneliness. The book was published in 2014, when his life as a cultural manager had fallen into a hole. In just a few years, he went from rubbing shoulders with friends like Woody Allen or Kevin Spacey, from being able to boast that Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa and best-seller Paulo Coelho praised him in the promotional strip for his book, to seeing how his professional prestige and personal life were destroyed. The reason was unjustified invoices according to the ruling when he was managing Niemeyer for an amount of 78,819 euros, money that he returned. “There is no one who knows more about loneliness than me,” he wrote in the first sentence, the only autobiographical one, according to its author.
Grueso (Oviedo, 1970) graduated in Law, but focused his professional career on cultural management and international relations, which led him to pilot various projects and institutions. Thus, he was director of External Interregional Cooperation Projects (DG XVI) within the framework of the Ecos and Overture programs of the European Commission. Signed by the in the early two thousand; In 2005, when the prestigious awards granted by this institution marked 25 years, he was commissioned to travel the world, visiting personalities who had been distinguished so that they could collaborate in the celebration.
In Rio de Janeiro he contacted one of the great architects of the 20th century, the Brazilian, winner of the Prince of Asturias Prize for the Arts in 1989, who told him that his thing was not words, but buildings, and that was why he decided to give away the project for what would be his only work in Spain, the Niemeyer Center, free of charge. It was in that year when he was appointed director, a position in which he remained until 2011.
Grueso immediately reappears in Madrid, as , with Ana Botella as mayor, to run the programming of the municipal theaters (from the Teatro Español to the Teatro Circo Price). He left the position on June 1, 2014 and then argued his departure that he wanted to focus on other projects and begin a new professional stage.
