The trial of the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana, former Minister of Labor and leader of the PP Eduardo Zaplana, which had to begin this Thursday in the Valencia Court, has been postponed due to the convalescence of his lawyer, who had to undergo surgery after suffering a heart attack. The court has set March 21 as the date on which the sessions will resume, which, in principle, will last for about five months in which they will try to resolve whether the alleged crimes of prevarication, document falsification, bribery, criminal organization and money laundering.
The call wasteland case arose due to the alleged collection of illegal commissions after the awarding of the wind energy parks and the vehicle technical inspection (ITV) stations. The Prosecutor's Office requests sentences ranging from 5 to 19 years in prison that they demand for Aznar's former minister.
In addition to Zaplana, 14 other people sit on the bench, among whom is his successor, the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana José Luis Olivas who, according to the accusation, also took bribes from the dealerships, the business group of the Cotino brothers. . For this reason, and despite the fact that the court knew the status of the former minister's defense, the court decided to maintain this Thursday's appointment so that, with all the lawyers gathered, a new start date could be determined.
According to the investigation, the scheme created to receive and launder the commissions moved 20.6 million euros. In its report, the Prosecutor's Office points out that after the awards, the Cotino group of companies sold shares in the dealerships that earned them 86.5 million euros “which justifies the high amount of the commissions.”
One of the main assets of the accusation, represented by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, is the testimony of one of Eduardo Zaplana's alleged front men, Fernando Belhot, the Uruguayan lawyer who was in charge of the “fiscal optimization” of the assets of the network, according to his own statement, and that, as he said, he always knew that the former regional president, with whom he met several times a year, was behind the operation. Belhot delivered 6.7 million euros to the asset recovery office (ORGA), which is supposedly part of the 20 million that Anti-Corruption believes were received fraudulently.
He wasteland case, which had its origin in a document in which the procedures to obtain the concessions of the ITV and the wind farms were supposedly described with the amounts that the bidders had to pay to obtain the awards, had one of its highlights in May of 2018, with the arrest of the popular leader for whom the judge ordered provisional imprisonment. The former regional president was in prison for nearly nine months, part of them in the hospital, admitted for the leukemia from which he suffers. After several requests for freedom, the court agreed to grant it to him in February 2019, when it understood that there was no longer a risk of escape or destruction of evidence. Eduardo Zaplana has maintained his innocence from the first moment, something that this Thursday he reiterated “absolutely.” His defense has tried, by all means, to ensure that the case does not go to trial, although as he left the City of Justice in Valencia today, Zaplana expressed his desire for the process to end as soon as possible: “If God wants, as soon as possible.”
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