Interpol has arrested businessman Alejandro Hamlyn López-Tapia in Abu Dhabi, where he had been on the run since 2025. Hamlyn was the president of the oil company Hafesa, which allegedly led a tax fraud scheme involving the non-payment of Value Added Tax (VAT) amounting to 154 million euros. The Audiencia Nacional sentenced Hamlyn’s ‘number two’ to 16 years in prison for this fraud. The Basque businessman was not tried as he was on the run, and before the oral hearing, he negotiated with the scheme led by Leire Díez to secure his impunity in exchange for compromising information against Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Balas of the Central Operative Unit (UCO).
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Businessman Alejandro Hamlyn, president of Hafesa, has been detained in Abu Dhabi since last Monday by Interpol. Hamlyn, as reported by The Objective, had at least two international arrest warrants requested by Spanish courts. On the one hand, Hamlyn is indicted in the 154 million euro fraud for VAT non-payments carried out through shell companies. Hamlyn is the alleged mastermind of the scheme, and after a long judicial investigation process that began in 2019, the oral hearing against about twenty defendants began in June 2025. A few weeks earlier, Hamlyn traveled to Abu Dhabi and refused to appear before justice, arguing that local authorities denied him departure from Abu Dhabi due to an alleged complaint against him.
During his escape in Abu Dhabi, Hamlyn contacted Leire Díez in February 2025 to negotiate the intervention of the ‘Ferraz fixer’ with the Public Prosecutor’s Office with the aim of minimizing his criminal responsibility in the fraud scheme. Díez, in a video conference lasting almost an hour, demanded Hamlyn’s support to obtain information against the head of the UCO, Antonio Balas, who was leading investigations into PSOE corruption cases. Hamlyn even assured that he had contacts and information to satisfy Díez’s request, but demanded that before the oral hearing, it be specified how he could remain outside the consequences of the tax fraud. “I have something, with one thing I give you [referring to Balas] he’s dead,” Hamlyn even stated in a conversation in which businessman Javier Pérez Dolset and lawyer Jacobo Teijelo also participated.
Furthermore, Hamlyn is linked to another criminal investigation opened against a national police officer assigned to the Audiencia Nacional. The president of Hafesa will have to answer to justice for payments of more than 4,000 euros monthly from 2022 to 2024 to this agent in exchange, allegedly, for judicial information about the tax fraud investigation. Hafesa made payments to the wife of police officer Javier Luis Muñoz, who also intervened in other judicial proceedings in exchange for collecting illegal commissions.
