The judge of the investigating court number 9 of Palma has this morning ratified the provisional imprisonment of Salvador Llinás Oñate, the 47-year-old Mallorcan businessman accused of a multi-million-euro fraud with the sale of cars from his company, Autoclick , and who was arrested a month ago in Taiwan after being on the run for six years. The magistrate rejects the allegation of lack of defence raised by his lawyer, Bartolomé Salas , and bases his decision to send Llinás to prison on the risk of flight and the high sentence he faces, eight years in prison.
Salvador Llinás was arrested in compliance with several international warrants at the end of October in Taiwan after being on the run for six years, when the Civil Guard uncovered the alleged fraud committed with his car rental company, Autoclick, based in Llucmajor. After being initially deported to Frankfurt, on Wednesday he was transferred under police custody to Madrid , and this morning he was taken to court, to appear by videoconference before the Palma judge who is investigating his case.
The businessman has invoked his right not to testify and his lawyer has requested his release, arguing that there had been a situation of defencelessness , since he had not had access to the case. The Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested his imprisonment , which has been joined by a dozen private prosecutions representing those harmed in the alleged fraud.
In the order published yesterday after the appearance, the judge of the 9th Court of Instruction of Palma recalls that in September 2022, the provisional imprisonment of Llinás, who at that time remained on the run, was already ordered. The magistrate takes into account the evidence against the accused, collected in an investigation carried out by the Traffic Investigation and Analysis Group (GIAT) of the Civil Guard. According to this investigation, Llinás used his position as administrator of the Autoclick company to sell to third parties vehicles that were not his property, since he had them in a renting situation or they were financing them . The Civil Guard quantified the number of vehicles sold fraudulently at 3,468 and estimated the total amount of the scam at 48,552,000 euros.
The magistrate believes that the crime under investigation carries a sentence of up to eight years in prison, and that there is a clear risk of flight, since Llinás escaped in 2018, shortly after the investigation began , and was not located until the end of October in Taiwan.
For all these reasons, it has decided to ratify the provisional prison status of Salvador Llinás.