The Socialists have governed L’Hospitalet de Llobregat for 43 years, a municipality that has not known any other political color in democracy. The second most populous city in Catalonia has always pampered the associative fabric and especially sports, a chapter to which it allocates more resources than to areas such as housing, the environment or education. The Consell Esportiu de L’Hospitalet (CELH), a non-profit organization to promote school sports, has been the apple of the Consistory’s eye. An ongoing judicial investigation points further: the entity has allegedly been used to weave a patronage network at the service of the socialist family and gain support with public money.
Participated by sports and school associations, the CELH is an entity controlled by the Partit dels Socialistes de Catalunya (PSC). In 2019, only two members of the management were “independent”. The rest maintained close ties with the party, according to reports from the National Police, which criticizes the “politicization” of this private entity: six were candidates on the municipal lists that year; two more were hired by the party as advisers to the City Council. The president of CELH is, at the same time, Councilor for Sports. This overlapping of roles explains, in part, the “lack of control” of the Consistory over the CELH accounts, says the Police. The entity had a “double accounting”, with a sort of box b (called here “internal cash”) that allegedly served to divert public money, according to the provisional conclusions of the investigating judge.
The PSC defends the innocence of the leadership of the party in L’Hospitalet and its mayor, Núria Marín. She in particular, underlines the training, she always acted properly. The court that handles the case keeps Marín under investigation along with twenty other people —15 of them are members of the PSC—. The illegalities that are investigated are embezzlement, false documents, prevarication and omission of the duty to prosecute crimes.
The cause arose in May 2020 when Jaume Graells, at the time deputy mayor appointed to supervise the CELH, reported to the Police the irregularities he had discovered: the annual accounts that the entity presented to the assembly of partners and the City Council could be up to 500,000 euros lower than those communicated to the Consell Català de l’Esport, the body of the Generalitat that supervises the sports institutions of Catalonia. The CELH management even went so far as to send the Generalitat false minutes of assemblies that had not taken place.
They “falsified and altered” the accounts
Graells came to the conviction that this gap in the accounts served to benefit a wide spectrum of people linked to the CELH and the PSC. After almost two years of investigation, the Economic and Fiscal Offenders Unit (UDEF) of the Police has ratified and expanded those conclusions. “Budgets were consciously inflated to collect large amounts in grants,” say the agents, who repeat a central idea: the CELH declared a lower income figure than it actually obtained. Sometimes, for the same project, he received payments in triplicate: from the City Council, from the participants and from the associations. That same lack of control is valid for expenses (per diems, arbitrators, collaborators) and prevents knowing what the real destination of part of the money was. According to one of the judge’s orders, those responsible for the CELH “falsified and altered the economic reality” of the entity, which enjoyed absolute freedom to weave and unweave because the City Council “has not exercised due control” at the time of audit the accounts.
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In February 2020, three months before going to the police station, Graells had warned Marín of the irregularities, who remains under investigation in the case for allegedly omitting his responsibility to prosecute crimes. The mayor, who also chairs the Barcelona Provincial Council —another of the institutions that subsidizes the CELH— testified before the judge that she acted properly: she notified those responsible for the entity of the facts, ordered a review of the documentation and commissioned an internal audit that was not completed due to the limitations of the coronavirus pandemic and because it overlapped with the police investigation. The judge ordered the emptying of Marín’s mobile phone, but she has not yet communicated her conclusions.
Most of the thousands of games that the UDEF has investigated are modest. There are undeclared cash payments to collaborators. Projects are planned without giving them publicity and without breaking down expenses or income, or what materials or resources are needed. And when it is done, there are incomprehensible loopholes. For some Jocs Florals With 8,000 participants, almost 300 technicians are needed when the entity only has a hundred of them. Instead, another project (Dynamization of the game in school playgrounds) only requires three people despite the fact that 11,000 participants have attended. In other cases, the police directly question whether the project has been carried out. like the program Hockey, children and youth at riskwhere photos that had already been taken in another activity appear.
Salvador Illa clothes the mayor
Although the case for now has not discovered evidence of illegal financing of the party, there are data that arouse suspicion such as a PSC lunch paid for by the CELH during the 2019 municipal campaign. In 2016, Cristóbal Plaza, then director of the CELH, received 47,000 euros in compensation for his dismissal despite the fact that he left voluntarily. Six months later, Plaza was appointed advisor to the councilor for sports, Cristian Alcázar, who is the one who had allegedly fired him. Plaza returned to CELH in 2019 as councilor and president of the entity. Alcázar, investigated by the judge, is currently deputy mayor and first secretary of the PSC of l’Hospitalet.
One year before the municipal elections, the situation for the PSC is high risk if Marín and Alcázar are prosecuted and go to trial. The party should renew its list in a short period of time in a fief like L’Hospitalet. An accusation against Marín would also add instability to the difficult pact they have with Junts per Catalunya to preside over the Diputación. The opposition also presses: “Marin has a clear responsibility. It is incomprehensible that he did not take action at the risk of possible destruction of evidence. Protecting the interests of the city has been the last of their priorities, ”explains Ana González, spokesperson for En Comú Podem, who exercises the popular accusation in the case, to this newspaper. González believes that the investigation has uncovered the “absolute lack of control and transparency” in public management and reproaches the mayor for not separating Plaza and Alcázar from the beginning.
Asked last January on TV3 if he put his hand in the fire for Marín, the first secretary of the PSC, Salvador Illa, replied: “I put my hand in the fire for very few people. I have every confidence that they have acted correctly and that there is maximum collaboration with the justice system”. The PSC leader reiterated the right to the presumption of innocence and added: “Depending on how things go, we will make decisions. But Marin has my full confidence.” Marín ceased to be president of the PSC at the party’s congress held last December. She was replaced by Miquel Iceta. She was appointed vice president, a position that had only existed once in the party’s history. Illa wanted to convey that she was not abandoning Marín.
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