“A setup and a big lie.” This is how the mayor of Badalona, Xavier García Albiol, has assessed the investigation of the case that led him to trial for two municipal antennas installed without a license and from which he was acquitted this Friday. The other five accused of urban prevarication have also been exonerated, in a resounding sentence that rules out any illegal action by the municipal officials who sat in the dock.
The accused received the acquittal with applause and hugs both inside the courtroom where the sentence was delivered and in the corridors of the Barcelona Palace of Justice. The mayor has hugged several close friends who have accompanied him to collect the ruling and has expressed relief as well as disgust at the “manipulation” to which, in his opinion, he has been subjected in this case.
The mayor, who has spent four years accused of a case that has ended in nothing, has in this Friday’s sentence the passport to be free of all suspicion. The resolution completely dismantles the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office, which accused the mayor of allowing the installation of the antennas without a license and asked him for up to two years and ten months in prison and ten months of disqualification.
The magistrates conclude that there is no evidence or indication that Albiol “even knew of the purpose of installing the antennas, much less that he made the decision to authorize it.” None of the witnesses who appeared at the trial mentioned Albiol as “intervening” in the issue of the antennas, the judges highlight. Nor does any document point to that intervention, they add.
“The investigation of the case was a setup and a big lie,” Albiol launched in a press conference from the Badalona City Council, in which he even accused, without evidence, the Government of promoting the case to “look for a hunting piece.” older” and “wanting to win in court what they have not won at the polls.” “It is a day of joy,” he concluded, unable to avoid tears.
The Public Ministry also requested that the companies Vodafone and Movistar be condemned as civil liability for profit for the installation of the antennas and that they compensate the council with around 17,000 euros for unpaid fees, but the judges of section 5 of the Barcelona Court has ruled it out.
The accusation’s thesis was partially deflated during the trial and at the end of the hearing the prosecutor withdrew the accusation against the former Badalona Security councilor Miguel Jurado, now PP councilor in Santa Coloma de Gramenet (Barcelona) and the Urban Planning councilor during the left-wing government of Badalona, Oriol Lladó.
In their ruling, the magistrates conclude that the two antennas were installed without “any type of municipal license or permit” and that the telephone operators also did not pay “any amount.” The irregularity persisted from 2012 to 2018, when the devices were removed. The judges conclude that none of the defendants’ conduct has “the necessary seriousness to be classified as criminal.”
At the trial, the mayor distanced himself from the irregularities in the installation of the antennas. He argued that being in charge of a municipality of 220,000 inhabitants implies that he was “oblivious” to this type of procedures, and guaranteed that, if he had known that they were operating without a license, he would have acted.
Albiol is thus once again acquitted of a judicial process, as has happened with the two previous cases in which he has been involved. He was exonerated in 2013 of the xenophobic pamphlet case, and, more recently, of the accusation of shaking a PSC advisor from Badalona.
The coincidence of the rules of distribution of the courts has meant that one of the members of the court and the speaker of his acquittal this Friday, the magistrate Ignacio de Ramón, was the same judge who, during his time at the head of the criminal court 18 of Barcelona twelve years ago acquitted Albiol in the pamphlet case.
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