GOWEX

» see gowex.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

GOWEX sold a product you were supposed to never think about. You walk past a newspaper kiosk in Madrid, your phone finds a network, the network is free, and somewhere behind that a company is being paid by a city council and an advertiser to make it happen. I have never been on it. That is most of the honest distance here. This was a municipal utility in Spanish cities, sold to Spanish retail investors on a Spanish junior market, and it stayed a local story right up to the week it became an international one.

Jenaro García Martín set up Let's Gowex S.A. in Madrid in 1999. For its first decade it was a wholesale telecoms business, and from 2009 it turned itself into the free public wifi company, putting access points in the street and on transport. It listed on the MAB, Madrid's junior market, in March 2010 at a valuation of 36 million euros, and later took a second listing on NYSE Alternext in Paris. Over the next four years its market value rose by 2,700 percent. The company said it had free networks running in 91 cities and more than a hundred thousand connection points.

In Madrid it ran as a public-private arrangement with Ana Botella's city hall, and GOWEX told anyone who asked that it was covering more than 40 percent of the capital. The council's account later shrank considerably: it said GOWEX had been a sponsor. By the summer of 2014 the company was worth about 1.4 billion euros, and it was being held up as proof that a Spanish technology company could be built on the junior market without ever leaving for New York.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what gotham saw ~

On Tuesday 1 July 2014 a small New York research outfit called Gotham City Research published a report on GOWEX. Its central claim was arithmetic rather than rhetoric: the actual wireless revenue was at most ten percent of what the company reported, so the correct value of the equity was zero. It also said the company was operating far fewer hotspots than it claimed.

GOWEX called the report categorically false and defamatory and said it would sue. It published its 2013 numbers again to prove the point, 182.6 million euros of revenue against 94.4 million of equity, and said the figures were audited. The shares fell 46 percent that day and 26 percent the next. On Thursday 3 July the MAB suspended trading at 7.92 euros, with roughly 870 million euros gone in two sessions and the regulator opening a market abuse inquiry.

~ the first weekend of july ~

The next two days are why this collapse is remembered as something other than a stock chart. On Saturday 5 July García told members of his own board that he had falsified the accounts. On Sunday 6 July he went to a Madrid court voluntarily and confessed there too. "I made a voluntary confession in court," he said. "I want to collaborate with justice." The board took his resignation the same day and announced that the company would seek bankruptcy protection, and the statement said the accounts had been falsified for at least the previous four years.

Three days later the first criminal complaints were filed at the Audiencia Nacional. The formal insolvency filing came a year after that, in July 2015. Spain's anti-corruption prosecutors delivered their indictment in 2019 and asked for a prison term of around eighteen years. As of January 2026 the case has still not been tried, which means García has spent longer waiting for a verdict than he spent running a company worth 1.4 billion euros. In a 2024 interview he said he wanted to start the sentence already.

~ still on the kiosks ~

The strangest part of this grave is that you can still see it. More than eleven years after the confession, bus shelters belonging to Madrid's municipal transport company and a good number of the city's kiosks still carry panels and stickers with the GOWEX logo on them, a blue hand cupping a wifi fan. Nobody took them down. The network behind them stopped working years ago, and the stickers have simply become another layer of old advertising on municipal furniture.

The money lost here was mostly small money. Retail investors on the MAB had been told this was the junior market's proof of concept, the Spanish company that made it onto a Paris exchange, and Spain's industry ministry had put grants and loans in behind them. A short seller in New York worked out in one report that the revenue was not there, and the man who had built the company spent five days disagreeing before he walked into a courthouse and agreed.

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