Judge Awilda Reyes Beltre of the Penal Chamber of the First Instance Court of the National District has ordered US$20.8 million to be refunded to the Prado Universal Corporation, the Torre Atiemar construction company. The president of the company is Arturo del Tiempo Marquez who is serving a seven-year prison sentence in Valencia, Spain for international drug trafficking. He was caught after a shipment he made to Spain from the Dominican Republic was found to contain cocaine. Attorney General Francisco Dominguez Brito, National District prosecutor Yeni Berenice Reynoso, governmental Banco de Reservas and the Ministry of Hacienda were ordered to make the refund. Moreover, the judge ordered the payment of a fine of RD$1 million per day for delays in fulfilling the order.
The sum is the difference in the total owed to the Banco de Reservas compared to the value of the Atiemar luxury high rise.
Prado Universal is a Panamanian-registered company. General manager Jorge Postigo and lawyers Manuel Olivero Rodriguez and Rene del Rosario represented the company in the case.
The court established that the Banreservas received 36 apartments for US$34 million plus US$145,884.15 in legal fees. The math showed that the debt of RD$551 million, at the time US$14.3 million resulted in a surplus of US$20.8 million.
The Banreservas took over the Torre Atiemar in March 2011 given that it had the first mortgage on the luxury building.
As reported in Diario Libre, Del Tiempo’s problems date back to 2009 when 935 kilos of cocaine were seized in the port of Caucedo in a shipment of granite in a freight container bound for Valencia. Four years later, a 1,200kg cocaine shipment was detected. The ship traveled to Barcelona under surveillance of the Spanish authorities and was confiscated on arrival. The case opened in the Spanish courts with an embargo on the property in Santo Domingo. The case acquired additional controversy after then-President Leonel Fernandez was revealed to have led the symbolic ground breaking ceremony to launch the building’s construction, and Del Tiempo was featured in a presidential press release where Fernandez highlighted the role of foreign investors.