• Accusation: The prosecutor asks for 2 years in prison for González Macho for manipulating the box office

" For three years I have not spoken to anyone at the cinema or attended any appointment related to him. Everything is not yet solved, but the relief I feel is enormous." With these words, Enrique González Macho tries to summarize what he considers to be the first station of his particular 'via crucis'.

The number 20 criminal court in Madrid acquitted that he was president of the Academy between 2011 and 2015 and producer Juan Romero (Mecanismo Films SL) of the crimes of subsidy fraud and documentary falsehood in regard to the film ' The interior island ', by Félix Sabroso and Dunia Ayaso.

The suspicion of what was called "box office fraud" or, shorter, "box office" weighed on the film released in 2009. The idea is simple. Basically, we would try to oversize the collection to reach the minimum time required by the Ministry to access the subsidy. All this before the reform of the law in 2015 that varied the model of granting aid.

There were producers who bought tickets to reach the minimum number of viewers (60,000 or 30,000, depending on the character of the films). Others, however, and this is where González Macho would be, in collusion with distributors and exhibitors, allegedly invented projections or false morning sessions.

The judge considers it unproven that part of the collection of 335,576 euros that the film completed in its first 12 months of exhibition was due to a different system than the regular ticket office. And although he admits that the lack of justification of the box office can be decisive for the return of the aid of 292,326 (as it happened by administrative means), it is not enough for a fraud conviction . The prosecutor asked for a penalty of two years in prison and a fine of one million euros.

González Macho admits that this is the first of a series of trials in process or to come . The next sentence will come for the film 'Rosa y negro', by Gérard Jugnot. "I can only insist on what I have been saying for three years now: nobody has distributed as much Spanish cinema as I have; I have never stopped paying a producer , and I have never done anything illegal," he says.

And it goes on: "What hurts me is that since my first appearance in the newspapers I went from being a suspect to a court and convicted . I was lynched. It is at such times when you appreciate the true value of an expression such as 'presumption of innocence'."

Originally, the complaint was filed by three former employees of the old Lido cinemas in Madrid. "They denounced me two years after being fired because he closed the cinema. In his complaint he pretends to be 'ghost projections' to morning sessions many of them for schools", defends the distributor, exhibitor and producer now acquitted. "I trust that the pattern of this sentence is that of the next ones," he concludes.

Be that as it may, the criminal courts only take care of some cases of the nearly 40 films investigated at the time by the General State Administration Intervention (IGAE). The Institute of Cinematography (ICAA) requested at the time the return of the aid received for the production of 32 films made between 2013 and 2015.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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