THE DEBTOR THE TAX OFFICE WAS REFUNDING

Years later, this man would be presented as a major debtor of unknown whereabouts — the premise of international seizures, of a European Arrest Warrant, of an INTERPOL notice. That is why it matters so much to establish what the Tax Office was doing with him in 2011 and 2012: it was processing his income tax and refunding him money.

Apolozan filed his 2011 personal income tax return before the Provincial Tax Authority of Bizkaia — the Form 100 is in the file (A.65). He was invoicing his Sopelana work openly, registered as self-employed. And the tax administration, after reviewing his year, refunded him between 10,000 and 13,000 euros of VAT (A.43). "It was the first time in my life that VAT was refunded to me," he wrote himself; with that income, he adds, he paid other taxes outstanding in Vitoria. The complete conduct of an ordinary taxpayer: he declares, collects what is his, pays what he owes.

The logic of this needs no jurists. A tax administration does not refund money to someone it cannot find. It does not process the income tax of a fugitive. A refund requires verifying the taxpayer, their address, their account, their activity — and paying them. Every euro refunded is an implicit certificate that the system knew perfectly well who he was, where he was and what he did.

Let the reader keep this image — the Tax Office transfer arriving in the account of the future "untraceable" man — to contrast it with what comes next: a decade of notifications that, according to the administrations, could never manage to find him. (Precision: the income tax and the refund are from the Provincial Tax Authority of Bizkaia, for his activity; the pursuit over the 2009 personal income tax was conducted by the AEAT from Alicante. Different administrations — the same taxpayer, the same period, two incompatible realities.)