Singer involved in money laundering case was short on cash

SPANISH singer Isabel Pantoja had debt problems before meeting former boyfriend and Marbella Mayor Julian Muñoz. Her economic situation got worse as she then bought two more properties, a ‘Malaya’ money laundering case investigator said. 

In fact, an employee of the bank that issued the mortgage of one of these properties in Marbella’s La Pera urbanisation – which Pantoja named as ‘My gipsy’ (‘Mi gitana’) – declared in court that she had not paid for two years, specifically since January 2007.

Both Isabel Pantoja and Julian Muñoz, as well as seven other people including Muñoz’s ex-wife Maite Zaldivar, are involved in the Malaya case.

In a court appearance, the money laundering police specialist said it was Maite Zaldivar’s brother the one who gave the instructions for evading €890,000 to Swiss accounts.

The story of the Malaya case was depicted in a fiction series for the Spanish television, dedicated to the life of Isabel Pantoja. In a recent parallel sentence, television producers RTVE have been fined €18,000 for implying in the series that a Marbella town hall worker had leaked information to the defendants.