Businessman José Enrique Yáber and his wife Michelle Pomares reported that they have been immersed in a legal process for more than four years after having delivered US$300,000 as payment for the real estate purchase of an apartment in the Torre Bellorizonte project, in the National District, a unit that, according to them, was subsequently transferred to third parties without their knowledge.
According to the couple’s complaint, the case originated after the signing, in November 2017, of a promise of sale contract for the acquisition of apartment 11-A of the aforementioned project. According to them, the delivery of the unit was scheduled for January 2019.
The family points out that, after that deadline was not met and after several attempts to follow up, it was able to verify that the property had been included in a series of transfers made on February 25, 2020, a date on which, they claim, 26 apartments of the same project were transferred to a recently established company.
They also maintain that other units would have been transferred to companies that, according to the records consulted by their lawyers, were not even established at the time of the transactions.
Based on those findings, Yáber and Pomares filed a criminal complaint in March 2021 for alleged acts of criminal association, breach of trust, bankruptcy, and money laundering. Since then, according to their version, the process has been marked by decisions to dismiss the case, requests for evidence not processed with speed, and successive procedural incidents.
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The legal representation of the couple maintains that the National District Attorney’s Office archived proceedings regarding some of the individuals and entities linked to the case, without having exhausted investigation procedures previously requested by the plaintiffs, which is why it was necessary to go before the Court of Appeals of the National District, a jurisdiction that revoked those archives, and ordered the trial of the persons unjustifiably excluded from the file by the National District Attorney’s Office.
They also indicate that once the Court of First Instance of the National District took over the knowledge of the trial against the accused, the court ordered the Prosecutor’s Office of the National District to carry out several investigation procedures, but given the negligence of the latter in complying with them, it was necessary to request a new court order to seek the execution of the ordered measures.
The case has gone through different judicial instances. According to the lawyers of Messrs. Yaber and Pomares, decisions of higher courts that ordered the course of the process to continue were followed by subsequent resolutions of first instance courts that declared the nullity or inadmissibility of the accusation, based on procedural objections relating to the type of action applicable to some of the reported facts.
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Currently, the case file is pending review by the Eighth Chamber of the Criminal Court of the First Instance Court of the National District, which set the trial on the merits for March 18, 2026.
“The expectation of our clients is that the case will finally be heard in a trial on the merits,” indicated the legal representation of the Yáber family, which maintains that the file contains documentation on the questioned transfers and the path of the funds delivered.
Yáber pointed out that the case raises questions about the effectiveness of protection mechanisms for buyers in real estate transactions and about the institutional response to disputes of this nature.
