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In a luxurious office in an exclusive area in the north of Bogotá, an investment scheme promoted as paradise began more than 10 years ago, but which resulted in a scam of more than 150 people and that led to the capture this week, to be Extradited to the United States, the renowned cardiologist and businessman Carlos Mahecha Díaz, who is being held in a Bogotá Police station.
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Mahecha and his partner, Juan Guillermo Arcila, were offering a ‘condo conversion’ business with a profitability of 18 percent, said several victims, which consisted of buying old properties, remodeling them with money from investors and converting them into luxurious apartments in Miami, which then they were rented. With the leases, more apartments were remodeled until complete buildings were completed and from the rents or subsequent sales of the finished products they were going to pay their investors.
But investigations in the United States for non-payment to creditors – most of them Colombians but also from Brazil, Miami, Mexico, among others – led to a 4-year prison sentence for Arcila, and uncovered a network of irregular money management that today they have Mahecha facing a fraud case. The doctor is accused of defrauding former congressmen, businessmen, former magistrates, among other people, of more than 50 million dollars.
“He presented himself as a great investor in the clinic, he said he was a rancher and rice farmer, he showed us incredible videos of his supposed farms, he presented himself as a man with a lot of money, a spectacular thing, that’s how he began to put us into business,” he said. a victim who met Mahecha more than 10 years ago through mutual friends from their schools – two of the most prestigious in Bogotá – and because he was a member of an important clinic in the country’s capital.
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Mahecha received his investors in his office, located in front of the Hacienda Santa Bárbara shopping center. “The meeting room was spectacular, with automatic curtains, the videobeam in which they showed you the project automatically lowered, it was wonderful,” recalled the victim.
A construction businessman who was also scammed explained that the office measured about 60 square meters, the meeting room was made of glass, the decoration was impeccable. “You would be dazzled when you came in, you thought ‘I sat with King Midas.’ I also traveled and saw the property in Miami, where Arcila received me, who got out of a BMW X6 truck. You looked at that and said ‘the virgin appeared to me, I’m going to become a millionaire,’ “he said.
With these luxuries and promises of high returns, Mahecha and Arcila raised capital from many people, who invested through their US company, Synergy Capital Group.
This began, from approximately 2004, sources said, and for some years there were no major problems, until shortly after the accounts no longer gave. Still, they did not stop raising money from investors who spent, before 2007, buying projects such as Luna and Qtz Bal Harbor, located in one of the most exclusive areas of South Florida.
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To Luna’s investors, unable to pay them, they passed their promises of payment to Qtz, a complex of three blocks that were to be apartment towers, but which ended up being –one only of the blocks– a boutique hotel in which the The night cost $ 500, sources said. But not even the putting into operation of the hotel settled their accounts and a real estate crisis in the United States, which occurred around 2008, accelerated the fall of the dream that had been sold to hundreds of people.
By 2009, according to later testimonies from Arcila himself, the accounts were bad, and in 2015 he told his partner that they should stop, but contrary to the advice, Mahecha pushed him away and replaced him with Felipe, his son, who still had millionaire debts. they had with investors had a monthly salary of $ 5,000, as stated Arcila in court interviews.
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Drowning in debt, in October 2017 and without notifying investors, the Mahechas sold Qtz to the Beach Haus company for $ 18 million, a price well below its commercial appraisal of at least $ 40 million. But not even with the sale of the hotel did they pay the investors, said the scammed builder.
Some time later, within several lawsuits in the United States, documents were uncovered that would prove mishandling of money and even emails from which it is inferred that they had no intention of responding to people, such as one from Felipe to his father, who classified investors in three groups: “possible payment”, “remote payment” and “idiots”, said sources close to the case in Miami.
Although the investments in the Mahecha projects were initially by wealthy people, with the accumulation of debts they began to look for other investors, among those people who put their pensions, their savings, their houses, among others.
In letters from victims sent to the Court of the Southern District of Florida, where the civil process is, cases such as that of a 65-year-old woman who, after being unable to work due to a work accident, invested the compensation money of the company in Quartz and lost everything. Today, he told the judge, he lives almost on charity and sometimes, it is read in his letter, he does not even have three meals a day.
Another testimony from a 70-year-old woman talks about how she invested all the money she had saved during 26 years of work in the project, they did not return anything and in 2017, when her father died, she did not even have to pay for the funeral.
Although Mahecha promised people that if something went wrong, he would respond to them, it did not. “He always told me not to worry, that he would pay me out of his own pocket if there was a problem in the United States and that was not fulfilled,” said another of the scammed.
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The renowned doctor and businessman is now awaiting his extradition to a country where he was once recognized as one of the largest in the real estate market in Florida, they even had an investor visa on the basis of reporting 30 million dollars for his activity, sources from Interpol Colombia said. And documents in the possession of this newspaper show that the US court has already sent judicial notifications to the Colombian Foreign Ministry about his wife and children in which he talks about the trial in which they are the defendants.
Police sources added that today Mahecha is surrounded by a law firm and that he has only said that he knew there was a process against him in the US, but that he believed it was civil and not criminal.
JUSTICE
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