Barcelona goalkeeper Victor Valdes, Fran Vázquez and Asier Del Horno have been charged with fraud in the taking of a coastal skipper exam.
Victor Valdes, the Levante winger Asier del Horno, midfielder Fran Vazquez and popular actor Oscar Jaenada have been charged for alleged fraud scams and identity theft tin order to obtain a skipper’s license for pleasure craft without having taken a single examination.
Jaenada and Del Horno were charged last June while Vázquez and Valdés were charged in July. All of them have obtained their skipper’s license without taking the exam – a test that would have been supplanted by other people using forged identity documents.
The fraud was made possible by two different means of obtaining the title: spoofing the examination by using someone else or with a headset through which the correct answers were transmitted.
In the case of the Barca goalkeeper Victor Valdes, another person put his picture on an ID card used for the coastal skipper exam in the Basque Country, which also means that a crime of falsification of documents had been carried out as Valdes’ cooperation was necessary to do it.
The player denied the facts when called to testify on his return from the Euro 2012 Championship, but could not explain convincingly why his ID card was manipulated and found on a computer file. By contrast, Del Horno and Jaenada would have been more receptive. Del Horno acknowledged the facts while Jaenada admitted that he knew a member of the plot.
The three footballers and the actor are just four out of a hundred defendants thanks to research carried out by the Magistrate Court No. 8 in Valencia and comes just four months after the scandal tainted MotoGP star Dani Pedrosa in April.
Victor Valdes has apologized for his involvement in an alleged plot to purchase yacht captain exams whereby 21 people have so far been arrested.
