The former president of the Region of Murcia Ramón Luis Valcárcel (PP), who on July 9 will sit on the bench accused of prevarication, embezzlement and fraud for his management in the construction and rescue of a water desalination plant in 2006, will have to deposit a bond of more than 74 million euros as a precautionary measure or, otherwise, their assets will be seized. This was confirmed this Wednesday by the Provincial Court of Murcia in an order against which there is no appeal and which comes to ratify the request that the Court of Instruction number 1 of Murcia had already made when it issued the opening of an oral trial against the former also MEP and president of the EU Committee of the Regions. In this procedure, Valcárcel faces penalties totaling 11 years in prison, 20 of absolute disqualification and another 27 of special disqualification for employment or public office, according to the requests of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Regarding the bail, the Provincial Court considers that the requested amount has been calculated “in accordance with the expert reports on possible economic effects” that the alleged crimes committed by the former president had on the public coffers of the autonomous community. According to the Prosecutor’s Office, the way in which the construction of the desalination plant, which is located in the Escombreras Valley, in Cartagena, and its subsequent sale was managed, generated those significant extra costs that the administration assumed.
The plant was built under a public-private collaboration formula in which the public part was represented by the Public Water Entity, which was created expressly for that purpose, and the private part, by a conglomerate of local companies called Hydromanagement and by companies of the ACS Group. It was planned that the construction would be self-financing with the profits from its operation, but in 2011 the autonomous community was forced to assume a ransom of 600 million euros. The prosecutor considers that Valcárcel knew the financial situation of the plant, which was one of his personal bets during his mandate, and that it has never operated at full capacity since it was inaugurated in 2007.
For the Public Ministry, the public part bought shares of the plant “detaching the private part from the ruin of the project” and generating economic damage to the public treasury for the benefit of private companies. The Provincial Court shares in its order the calculations of the Prosecutor’s Office that this extra cost for the administration coincides with the 74 million euros of bail imposed and rules out that the amount is “disproportionate, irrational and arbitrary.”
This judicial procedure, popularly known as “La Sal II”, is a separate piece of another procedure, “La Sal I”, and the Court understands that Valcárcel will have the right to demand, if necessary, that the rest of the defendants in that piece initially assume the proportional part of that figure based on the responsibility that each one is shown to have. But, until that happens, the Court does not consider that “duplicity” is being incurred in the requests for bail for the defendants.
The former president voluntarily left the honorary presidency of the PP of Murcia in April 2023 and resigned as a member of the party after the opening of the oral trial was made public. This will begin on July 9, when a preliminary hearing has been set in which the parties will be able to consider reaching a conformity agreement.
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Valcárcel will be the second president of the Region of Murcia to pass the bench. The first was his successor in office, Pedro Antonio Sánchez, against whom various corruption cases were pending during his time as mayor, and who was sentenced in March 2023 to three years in prison and 17 years of disqualification for rigging a contest to award the construction works of an auditorium in Puerto Lumbreras.
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