Students defrauded of €30k by jailed Mexican businessman ‘not pleased’ with outcome

At his sentence hearing at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court on Thursday, Judge Orla Crowe imposed an 18-month sentence with the final nine suspended. She said a longer prison sentence would be difficult for him because he is a non-national.

The court heard he has paid back €18,050 to his victims which will be divided equally among them based on the payments they made which ranged from between €1,200 to €3,800.

Dressed in a black bomber jacket and jeans and a grey shirt, Ramirez could be heard protesting with his legal team saying “I will pay the rest in two weeks” when they explained he was to be incarcerated.

His sentence included a bond of €100 and he was ordered to keep the peace from the day of his sentence and for up to two years of his post release.

Mr Ramirez stood up in the dock after speaking to his barrister and said “yes” in agreement to the conditions of his prison sentence.

Judge Crowe said Mr Ramirez was in a “significant position of trust to young people travelling from very far away”. There is a “huge breach of trust,” she said.

She said she had listened to all 18 victim impact statements by the students given to the court on previous hearings and that they were “very distressing”.

Some, she said, had “lost their life savings, others were unable to attend funerals of their loved ones at home” and one student had to “avail of food from a homeless service”.

She said the “deception had significant and serious consequences on the young non-nationals who did not have the necessary resources” to fall back on when they lost their money.

“This would have, of course, been well-known to the defendant who is a non-national himself,” she said.

Judge Crowe said the maximum custodial sentence for each of the counts was five years in prison and she was of the view that there was a headline sentence of two years.

There were mitigating factors, she said, which included that Mr Ramirez had paid back more than half of the €30,000 he defrauded the students of, and that he was a previously legitimate businessman in Ireland with no previous convictions.

Ramirez set up the former Travel Now business in Dublin in 2018 and was successful until the covid pandemic. He was the CEO of the company which organised English courses for students who came to Ireland to study.

The court heard he was taking money from the injured parties from June 10, 2020, to June 18, 2021, without securing the courses for the students.

Five of the 18 affected students were in court for the sentence and said they were “not pleased” with the outcome.

Ana Patricia Garibay (33) from Mexico had been defrauded of €1,500 by Ramirez when she tried to buy a place on an English course.

She told the Irish Examiner: “I was here for nearly five years and to study English and I work. I have a visa stamp 1 so I am sponsored by my work, and I am a chef.

“I booked a course with Travel Now and I paid his agency. The first course was fine, and the second course was when he lost the money and then he went back to Mexico.

“I realized a lot of people had lost their money and it became so upsetting. I don’t know how to feel. It went on for so long and it’s not about the money, the industry is not looked after properly.”

Mahsun Karakoyun (29) from Turkey said: “This is not justice really. Sending him to prison at least he will have time to reflect and hopefully he will not do it again and maybe we can fight against the government for not looking at this more, the stress and anxiety was so hard.

“I don’t feel any better over this, he stole from us, and it’s hurt many people.”