The Generalitat of Catalonia and the Iturri company, investigated for alleged fraud in the repair of Firefighters vehicles, have reached an agreement by which the Catalan administration has paid almost 2.1 million euros for non-payment of work provided between April 2021 and June 2022. This was the period in which the company continued repairing trucks under minimum service conditions after the termination of the maintenance contract, coinciding with the beginning of suspicions of overbilling in the previous year.
As stated in the documentation obtained by elDiario.es, the agreement between the parties occurred in the contentious-administrative jurisdiction and not in the criminal case in which Iturri and several charges of the Catalan Firefighters remain charged. In this case, the Generalitat acts as an accusation together with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office for an alleged fraud related to Iturri’s billing between 2020 and March 2021. In its final report, advanced by the ARA newspaper, The Mossos have concluded that Iturri charged an “extra cost” to the Firefighters.
The agreement in the contentious process, however, has been an unexpected boost for the defenses of the charges of Iturri and the Firefighters investigated in the criminal case. The company has already registered a letter before the judge in which it anticipates its intention to request the case be filed, arguing that the audit that led to the agreement with the Generalitat shows that the work was “effectively carried out”, contrary to what was maintained. by the Prosecutor’s Office.
The case dates back to April 2021, when the head of the Firefighters’ technical service reported that the contract with the Iturri company for the maintenance of the truck fleet no longer had a balance. The subsequent overbilling of the service, as explained by several witnesses and those investigated in the case, was common during the decade in which Iturri had been winning maintenance contracts for Firefighter vehicles.
At least from 2014 to 2021, the money that the Generalitat delivered to Iturri after formalizing the contract was insufficient, so an exceptional legal figure called the extrajudicial credit recognition mechanism was resorted to to pay for the repairs once the money ran out. The extraordinary expense was not decided by the Department of the Interior, but due to its exceptional nature it was approved by the Executive Council of the Government.
In 2021, the acting Minister of the Interior of the Government of Junts, Miquel Sàmper (now head of Business in the Executive of Salvador Illa) decided to take the case to the Prosecutor’s Office a few weeks before his dismissal. His successor, the Republican Joan Ignasi Elena, removed the company and terminated the contract that the Generalitat had with the company coinciding with the opening of the criminal case in November 2021.
Due to the essential nature of the service provided by Iturri, the company continued to carry out maintenance work on the Generalitat’s aging fleet of Firefighters vehicles until June 30, 2022, when three new companies began to provide the services.
In the case that is being followed in the 14th investigative court of Barcelona, according to sources in the case, an expert report is being awaited to confirm the over-invoicing that the Prosecutor’s Office detected after a complaint from the Ministry of the Interior, at that time in the hands by Junts and Miquel Sàmper.
According to Anticorruption, the amount invoiced by Iturri to the Generalitat in the first quarter of 2021 for work carried out in 2020 amounted to 1.9 million, when in reality the repairs only cost 575,017 euros.
After trying without success before the administration itself, Iturri decided to go to court in 2023 to claim non-payments from the Generalitat between April 2021 and June 2022, a period in which there were two forced extensions of the maintenance contract. According to his claim, the amount owed by the Generalitat amounted to 2.3 million euros, of which 2.1 million have finally been paid.
Overall, as detailed by Iturri’s lawyer, the first payment of 1.2 million euros corresponding to the period between April and October 2021 occurred after an audit by the Generalitat that validated the invoices after verifying that there were no “significant differences.” between the work invoiced and performed. In the second period of forced extension (between November 2021 and June 2022, the payment amounts to 959,093.21 euros and was also “paid” by the Generalitat and “accepted” by Iturri after an external “verification.”
On May 23, 2024, with the ERC Government already in office, the Generalitat and Iturri requested the suspension of the contentious procedure to negotiate and reach an extrajudicial agreement, which was communicated to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) last October 1st. The pact implies that the Generalitat recognizes and pays almost one million euros for the work provided but not collected during the forced extension period.
Transfer the audit to the criminal case
The agreement between Generalitat and Iturri in the contentious process came about after an audit of the services provided by the company during the forced extension period. The company intends that this ruling also serve to deactivate the criminal case, where the alleged fraud of 2020 and the first quarter of 2021 is still pending expert certification. In fact, Iturri contributed it to the criminal case on October 9, only eight days after closing the contentious procedure.
According to Iturri’s defense, the invoices under scrutiny in both the criminal and contentious cases “were issued under identical verification procedures and protocols.” In short, what has been used to settle the 2021 and 2022 claim should also serve to end the criminal case for the 2020 invoices, at the company’s discretion.
The work being investigated in the criminal case, Iturri insists, “corresponds to services requested by the Firefighters and effectively provided” by the company. The “verification” through audit of the controversy over the budget depletion of the service and the subsequent overbilling, adds Iturri, “has been accepted” by the Generalitat in the contentious case that has been closed, but the same happened with the 2020 invoices. “It cannot be considered an unusual practice of the Generalitat,” the company concludes.
“The incriminating story of the complaint is radically false,” concludes Iturri to refute the “solid corroboration” of the “budgetary and accounting irregularities” in the contractual relationship between the Generalitat and the company that the judge found, who has ruled out that the company paid commissions to some official or political official and that the Generalitat modified the car repair contracts with the sole objective of benefiting Iturri.
The judicial case is open for the crimes of embezzlement, prevarication, contracting fraud and falsification of public documents. During this January, several witnesses will be paraded before the magistrate. Then the magistrate will have to decide whether to file the case or send it to trial.
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