The High Court of Justice of the Basque Country (TSJPV) has upheld the four-year prison sentence imposed by the Provincial Court of Gipuzkoa on a woman who made a Guipuzcoan elderly man believe that she was in an emotional relationship with him in order to appropriate almost 400,000 euros.
The Civil and Criminal Chamber of the TSJPV has rejected both the appeal filed by the convicted woman and the one presented by the defense of the victim, who requested that the sentence be raised to eight years in prison, and it declares costs to be borne ex officio.
The ruling of the TSJPV, dated last November 5 and against which an appeal for cassation is still possible, details that on January 25, 2022, the accused and the elderly man met in a restaurant in the Belgian capital. The man, a resident of San Sebastián, was then 82 years old and had been widowed a few years earlier.
The woman, “taking advantage of the victim’s ‘vulnerability’” and of his “‘situation of loneliness,’” made him believe “that she had romantic interest in him and that she was going to be his sentimental partner” with the aim of “obtaining an illicit financial benefit,” according to the judicial resolution.
After spending a few months in Brussels, the alleged couple moved to Denia (Alicante), where in June 2022 the elderly man agreed to acquire a home in order to live with her and paid 264,110 euros for the property. In the public deed, she had it recorded that “she was donating to the woman the amount he was supposed to contribute for the acquisition,” set at 132,055 euros.
In addition, the woman who had already been convicted asked him for money to buy a house in Romania for her sick mother and to financially support a relative, so the victim made four transfers in her favor for a total of 233,500 euros, to which other transactions amounting to 7,500 euros were added.
Credit card
The accused also gained access to the man’s credit card, with which she carried out “numerous cash withdrawals between January 2023 and February 2024,” for a “total of 21,770 euros,” in addition to ordering transfers to her own family members. Taken together, the money defrauded amounts to 397,205 euros.
The sentence emphasizes that the victim “presents a deficiency in socio-affective skills, an affective disorder that prevented him from making an adequate assessment of the relationship of affection he had with the accused,” which caused him to be “lacking sufficient capacity to deliberate and decide,” being “influencable and manipulable, especially in the economic sphere.”