The “Robin Hood” of banks, who gave half a million euros in un-returned loans to social projects, was jailed under a more recent accusation of e-commerce fraud
Catalan activist Enric Duran is on trial in Nanterre, France, having been imprisoned preventively in the Osny-Pontoise penitentiary centre, 40 kilometres from Paris, since June 12. He is accused of an alleged crime of money laundering, involving exchanges between Euro and cryptocurrencies with a person who would have obtained the money fraudulently. The activist believes the French state is “criminalising cryptocurrency transactions, a legal but unregulated activity”.
His mother, Fina Giralt, told Directa that Enric Duran was arrested by the French police at seven o’clock in the evening last June 10 in Paris, in his rented accommodation, and was kept for two days in the police station until he was sent to prison. “They must have followed him to his flat. He stopped communicating with us and the next day we learned that he had been arrested”, says Giralt, who believes that the French police “have taken advantage of the fact that he has been wanted by Spanish justice to now take him under the pretext of the exchange of cryptocurrencies”.
In 2008, Enric Duran generated an intense public debate when he announced that he had “stolen” 492,000 euros from different banking entities, in loans that he had no intention of returning, with the aim of promoting a debate around the capitalist and speculative financial model and using the money for social purposes. He became known as the ‘Robin Hood of banks’ (or ‘Robin’ Banks’), and was accused of defrauding 39 banking entities and document falsification. The case expired in 2023 due to the statute of limitations.
According to Fina Giralt, the user with whom Enric Duran exchanged coins would have committed fraud between June 3 and August 20, 2024, to sell products over the internet that he then did not send to buyers. The money he got from the sales he exchanged for cryptocurrencies with several people, among them the Catalan activist — the only one arrested in the case so far. According to Duran himself, in a letter sent by his family to the media, he only exchanged coins between November 20 and December 13, 2023, and from March 5 to April 20, 2024, several months prior to the time period in which the e-commerce scam would have been committed.
Enric Duran claims in the letter that he did not know the origin of the money, which he has tried to demonstrate through transcripts of the conversation he had with the user through the local Coinswap cryptocurrency buying and selling platform. “The client lied to me that he wanted to invest in bitcoin the income from his e-commerce business. The lies continued from the beginning to the end,” he emphasises. Although his lawyer, Laura Ben Kemoun, has provided a copy of the conversation, the justice “has never been interested in reading it”. He says: “Without my record as the Robin Hood of the banks, I would not have spent these months in prison. With the experience of the interrogation, one can believe that the French police were more interested in finding a reason to incriminate me than in the truth”.
The activist believes that this case should be used to denounce how “French justice is criminalising the trade of cryptocurrencies”. He explains that these exchanges are not regulated between natural persons and micro-companies, only in the case of medium and large companies. “Even the big banks are unaware of the illicit origin of the funds, therefore it is impossible for an individual person to know”, says Duran.
