A story about illegal short-term rentals in Barcelona has developed a Latvian financial and business angle.
Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia has been reporting on organised groups operating tourist accommodation in Barcelona without the required licences. The model described in Spanish reporting is relatively simple: apartments are rented, divided into rooms and offered to tourists through platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com. What may look like separate listings can form part of a larger business network using companies, intermediaries and people placed between the real operators and the properties.
La Vanguardia later described a “Latvian connection” in this story. According to the Spanish reporting, one of the people linked to the rental network had been travelling frequently to Riga, while bank statements pointed to spending on luxury clothes, restaurants, a car and a boat.
LSM/Latvijas Radio then followed the Latvian part of the story.
The Latvian investigation identified the man as Luiss Eduardo Saavedra-Gajoso, a Peru-born entrepreneur who has lived in Latvia for several years and has a private account in Swedbank Latvia. The investigation also pointed to a wider regional footprint. Public registers showed links to an Estonia-registered restaurant-technology company, Ordeno OÜ, and a recently registered Latvian company, 4HOSTS, where Saavedra-Gajoso was listed as the beneficial owner.
This makes the Latvian angle broader than private spending alone. It includes residence, companies, addresses, a bank account and reported money flows connected to a business background already questioned in Spain.
According to LSM/Latvijas Radio, €401,000 entered Saavedra-Gajoso’s private Swedbank account between May 2023 and June 2025 from three Spanish companies: Millenium Kaisha S.L., Techlease Investments S.L. and Sport Facilities BCN S.L. The payment descriptions repeatedly referred to dividends or dividend advances. Several payments also included Revolut identifiers and Lithuanian or Spanish IBAN accounts.
On paper, not every element is unusual by itself. Payments from EU companies are not automatically suspicious. A dividend label is not automatically false. A private client living in Latvia can have foreign business income. A regulated European payment channel is not an offshore structure.
But the case changes when the elements are placed together.
The same Latvian account trail was linked to specific spending in Latvia. LSM/Latvijas Radio reported that €60,000 was transferred in two payments to a Riga-based company for the purchase of a boat. The investigation also referred to the purchase of a Porsche Macan 4 in Riga for more than €87,000. Latvian police have an active criminal process concerning possible document forgery related to the car purchase; this is not, by itself, a money-laundering case.
The Porsche and the boat are therefore not the starting point of the story. They are the point where the Latvian connection becomes concrete.
A car and a boat do not prove illegality. But they are not only purchases. They are assets with continuing costs: insurance, repairs, maintenance, storage, marina fees and depreciation. That makes them relevant for a source-of-wealth assessment.
The question is not whether a successful person can buy expensive things. The question is whether the full profile fits together: the Spanish rental-business background, the Latvian residence and company footprint, the private Swedbank account, the company-linked payments and the disposable capital needed to buy and maintain high-cost assets.
This is the Baltic signal in the case.
After Latvia’s post-2018 banking-sector clean-up, the next risk does not always have to look like the old offshore model. It may appear through ordinary-looking EU payment chains: platform-linked income, private accounts, dividend labels, regional companies and assets bought in Latvia.
The story is not that a Latvian bank obviously “let in mafia money”. The more useful question is how a Barcelona business described in Spanish reporting as an illegal short-term rental network developed a Latvian bank-account, business-footprint and asset-purchase trail.
An illegal business in one EU country does not always become visible to another country’s financial system at the first incoming transfer. Sometimes it becomes visible later — when the foreign business develops a local footprint and the money starts turning into assets.