The Madrid Prosecutor's Office requests 16 months in prison for former Real Madrid and Fuenlabrada basketball players Marcus Slaughter and Andy Panko for allegedly falsifying their roles to play as community players. For the rest of the defendants, Richard Ngumea Balboa, Julián Aranda de Marcos and Hugo López de Marcos, claim 22 months in prison for a continuing crime of documentary falsity.

At the end of 2014, Aranda de Marcos was the representative of Slaughter and Panko. Among the three, according to the Prosecutor's Office, they developed a plan "with the purpose of obtaining documentation of a false nature from the Republic of Equatorial Guinea." Specifically, the idea was to get passports from that country for both players.

With this documentation and, using the so-called Cotonou-Benin Agreement, signed in 2000 between the European Union and 78 African states, including the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, both players could acquire the status of "community" before the Association of Basketball Clubs (ACB) and the Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB). Therefore, they ceased to be extra-community "condition in which, being Americans, they had been signed."

35,000 euros each

This new situation of supposed citizens of Equatorial Guinea, and therefore community for federal purposes, "would be very beneficial, in order to have a more profitable situation, personally, in their respective sports clubs."

Aranda, with the consent of Slaughter and Panko, met in Madrid with Hugo López Muñoz, coach of a team from Equatorial Guinea called, Malabo Kings, who in turn had a relationship with Richard Nguema Balboa, the person who could provide them with false documentation and that, moreover, he was one of his players on that team. The price for obtaining the two false documents was estimated at "around" 35,000 euros each.

"With the same number"

According to his plan, in February 2015, Balboa made for himself, or through a person of unknown identity, but acting on his behalf, two passports of the Republic of Equatorial Guinea, with supposed number A001696 "in the name of Slaughter and Panko "with the same passport number".

The prosecutor points out that both were of "false nature, because although they were legitimate documents in their origin, they had replaced their biographical pages in their entirety," placing the photo of Slaughter in his passport and Panko's in his.

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