Spain’s Supreme Court upheld Roberto García Martínez’s fraud conviction on 21 January 2026, sentencing him to two years in prison and ordering joint compensation of $3.46 million to Agrupación Gestora Empresarial S.A., known as Agruges. The sentence also included an eight-month fine at €30 per day. On 7 November 2026, Eurobattery Minerals AB announced that García Martínez, its chief executive and a board member, had been remanded in custody in Sweden.
Eurobattery said it had no further information about the detention and would provide updates when available. In September, the company reported that Sweden’s Economic Crime Authority had notified García Martínez that he was suspected of three aggravated insider-dealing offences involving financial instruments issued by or connected with Eurobattery. The allegations remain under investigation. The company has not said whether they are connected to the later remand. On 22 October, Eurobattery informed the market that it had withdrawn García Martínez’s powers.
The Spanish conviction concerned a separate Sierra Leone mining investment solicitation, not Eurobattery’s A Gudiña wolfram project. According to the judgment summary, García Martínez and another defendant told Agruges they owned a gold-mining operation and sought investment for large-scale gold and diamond extraction. Agruges transferred $3.46 million, but the court found the money was not used for the agreed purpose. The case is distinct from the Koldo investigation, in which prosecutors sought proceedings against former Adif president Isabel Pardo de Vera, as covered in an earlier court report.
García Martínez served as Eurobattery’s chief executive in Galicia and sat on its board from 2019. After news of the Spanish conviction, trading in the company’s shares on the Stuttgart stock exchange was suspended, and board chairman Jan-Olof Arnbom resigned. The Spanish ruling is separate from the Swedish insider-dealing suspicions, which have not resulted in a reported Swedish conviction.
The legal setbacks came as the company sought strategic-project status from the European Union for its A Gudiña wolfram mine in Ourense. Eurobattery had announced a financing agreement worth close to €6 million with Loft Capital Limited, structured as convertible bonds in four tranches over 24 months. Its Galician subsidiary also carried out a €150,000 capital increase. García Martínez was described as one of the principal promoters of the San Juan de Pentes wolfram project, promoted through Eurobattery’s Spanish mining structure.
The company estimates wolfram reserves at one million tonnes, up from 60,000 tonnes, with a projected economic impact of about €500 million and 150 jobs. These are forecasts, not confirmed production or employment figures. The project had not entered commercial production in the reported account. Reports said preparatory work to reopen the open-cast mine and build a services building in the parish of Pentes had stalled after the legal scandal.
