Spanish Police Chief Arrested After €20 Million Found Hidden in Home Linked to Record Cocaine Seizure

Spanish authorities have arrested one of the country’s most senior police officers after €20m (£17m) in cash was discovered concealed in the walls and ceilings of his home, in connection with the nation’s largest-ever cocaine seizure.

Óscar Sánchez Gil, until recently the head of the fraud and anti-money laundering division of Spain’s national police in Madrid, was taken into custody last week alongside 15 others, including his romantic partner—also a police officer serving in the Madrid region—a police source confirmed, without naming her.

The raid took place at the couple’s residence in Alcalá de Henares, a town of roughly 195,000 residents located 18 miles (30km) east of Madrid. There, officers uncovered the €20m hidden within the structure of the property. An additional €1m was found in Sánchez Gil’s office, stashed inside two locked cupboards, with the bills ranging from €50 to €500 denominations, according to the same police source.

Following their arrests, the couple were charged with drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption, and membership of a criminal organisation. After appearing before a Madrid court last week, they were remanded in custody, a judicial source confirmed.

Spanish media have reported that the arrests are connected to the interception last month of 13 tonnes of cocaine in the southern port of Algeciras. The shipment, originating from Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil—a major hub for drug trafficking—was concealed among crates of bananas. Police announced the seizure only last week, describing it as the biggest cocaine haul in Spanish history and “one of the largest seizures in the world.”

Authorities stated that the container was bound for a Spanish importer based in Alicante, a south-eastern coastal town, who for years had been importing large volumes of fruit from Ecuador. Subsequent searches of several homes and offices in Madrid and Alicante, following the cocaine bust, uncovered connections between the importer and Sánchez Gil, Spanish media reported.

According to the daily newspaper El Mundo, Sánchez Gil had already fallen under suspicion among his colleagues, who had wiretapped his phone. A source told the newspaper that the father-of-three, who is in his 40s and lives in a brick house secured by metal gates, is believed to have worked with the traffickers for “at least five years.” During this period, he allegedly provided them with intelligence about surveillance operations targeting shipping containers in Spanish ports, enabling them to evade inspections.

Though his lifestyle was reportedly not ostentatious, the discovery of such vast sums of cash prompted officers quoted by El Mundo to compare his home “to that of Pablo Escobar,” the infamous Colombian drug baron killed by police in 1993. Escobar’s nephew once claimed to have found a plastic bag containing $18m hidden within the walls of one of his uncle’s residences.

El Mundo further reported that part of Sánchez Gil’s alleged illicit fortune had been laundered through cryptocurrency purchases and the acquisition of a large fleet of private hire vehicles, registered under the name of one of his relatives.

Spain remains a key gateway for narcotics entering Europe, due to its historic ties with former Latin American colonies such as Colombia and Peru—both major cocaine producers—and its geographic proximity to Morocco, one of the world’s top cannabis exporters.

By fLEXI tEAM