The inheritance of a million-dollar fortune and almost half of one of the most famous restaurants in Bogotá involves the suicide of a successful businessman, a model making a career in Paris and even a former mayor who tried a scam with which he almost cheated the system. Colombian court.
The story began in 2016 and is going through a legal process that took 7 years to resolve and whose decision was announced this weekend.
The verdict of the 10th family court is clear: the young Stefanía García Montagut, a model based in France, is the only heiress to a fortune of more than $5,000 million pesos in goods and cash and 40% of the Pesquera Jaramillo restaurant, one of the first places in the capital to eat gourmet fish and which, today, is valued at 10,000 million pesos.
Suicide and the millionaire promissory note
The origin of the legal battle began with the death of the successful businessman Hernán García González, one of the founders of La Pesquera who was found dead in his luxurious home north of Bogotá.
His body was found hours after he died by one of his service employees who was ordered not to attend for a couple of days while he was on vacation. The lady, who knew about his depression crisis, ignored him and went to work the morning of March 2, 2016.
The image spoke of a possible homicide: a bloody body and a 9-millimeter weapon with which he had been shot in the left side of his head.
After a month of investigation, the authorities concluded that Hernán García died by suicide at the age of 54, so the procedures began to distribute the wealth he had made with La Pesquera and other smaller businesses in Bogotá. Thus, the businessman only had as a possible heir his little daughter who, by then, had already gone to live in France after the separation of her parents.
Divorced, and without new official partners after that marriage, Hernán was seen attending lavish parties of the Bogota business community with young women and former beauty queens. After his death, none of them appeared to ask for part of the inheritance or demand money.
A fraud was set up
But such a million-dollar fortune did not go unnoticed. A few days after the news of García’s death, a man appeared with a bill of exchange for 1,100 million pesos that, supposedly, had been signed by the businessman just two days before committing suicide.
It was the former mayor of Carmen de Apicalá, in Tolima, and former candidate for the Senate for the U Party, Dagoberto Díaz Barreto, a man who posed as a partner of Hernán García and who demanded during these 7 years that he be paid that money that agreed with him before he died.
From France, the new millionaire hired a lawyer who represented her throughout all these years and who gave her the good news last Saturday: the judge in the case concluded that the signature had been forged and that, therefore, the bill of exchange remained without legal effects and the entire fortune belonged to her.
With that decision, the young Stefanía García Montagut was left with 40% of a business that invoices around 15,000 million a year. The remaining 60% of hers belongs to two other family members with whom she has a good relationship: her uncle Henry García, owner of 55%, and her cousin Juan Camilo García, owner of the remaining 5%.
El Colombiano tried to communicate with the politician Dagoberto Díaz to find out his version of the events. Despite this, he did not receive a response until the closing of this edition.