Two businessmen in Spain investigated for attributing speeding offences to dead man

Two businessmen are being investigated by police in Spain after officers discovered that they had been transferring their companies traffic fines into the name of a dead person.

The two accused residents of Murcia identified a former employee who had died every time they received a fine from Spain's Directorate General of Traffic (DGT) as the driver of the vehicles involved. In all ten cases, they used the identity of a Colombian man who had died in his home country prior to the dates of the traffic offences.

The DGT, in collaboration with the Civil Guard in Albacete, had launched an investigation to find the man, who had once lived in Albacete. They were going to notify him of the loss of his driving licence in Spain due to all of the points he had lost for the accumulation of offences.

All of the fines were due to speeding and had been picked up on different DGT radar traps between April 2021 and July 2022. Police then discovered the alleged perpetrator of the violations had died in Colombia in 2019, which made it impossible for him to be the same driver of the vehicles involved in the violations.

The Guardia Civil said that falsely identifying a driver in an administrative infringement is a crime of false documentation. Penalties range from imprisonment of three to six years, and a fine.