The Central Criminal Court of the National Court has acquitted the twelve directors of the Bank of Valencia accused of falsifying the accounts in the years 2009 and 2010, including its former president José Luis Olivas, who faced two years in prison and who was its advisor. delegate, Domingo Parra, for whom the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office urged two and a half years in prison. He considers that the accusation was “so vague” that it generated “defenselessness.”
The sentence, notified this Tuesday, comes twelve years after the investigation began and after a trial that lasted months in the National Court and ended with Anti-Corruption withdrawing the accusation for nine of the dozen directors who sat on the bench. . In addition to Olivas and Parra, he continued to request prison sentences for Miguel Monferrer, but he has also been acquitted. Other accusations did maintain the request for penalties for all.
After analyzing the facts and the arguments of the defenses in the trial, the Central Criminal Court agrees with them that “simply (by) reading the order transforming the case into an abbreviated procedure” that put them on the verge of the dock , dictated four years ago, it can be seen that the intermediate statements of the years 2009 and 2010 that they are accused of falsifying are not mentioned and “not even the written conclusions mention what they are”, so they cannot be object of the case.
He draws the same conclusion regarding the falsehoods in the accounts, “of which neither in the order transforming the case into an abbreviated procedure nor in any of the documents of provisional conclusions of the accusations are the specific accounting notes that are said to be false” and “the most” that is provided is that the accused “were knowledgeable” because they were included in the reports of the Bank of Spain, but nothing more.
«With such a vague accusation, the first question is imposed on the judge and the defense to search and search the case to try to discover what those specific accounting notes are that are claimed to be false by the accusations to establish the crime of falsifying the accounts. “It is not defensible that this omission is intended to be resolved with a mere reference to the internal reports issued by the Inspection Service of the Bank of Spain,” the resolution says.
A report from the Bank of Spain is further proof
For the judge, “these omissions in the documents of provisional conclusions of the accusations cannot be resolved by the mere fact that in the document of definitive conclusions all the accounting notes for the years 2009 and 2010 are reported for the first time. falsehood is advocated” because “the defenselessness was already created, as each and every one of the accused was prevented from defending themselves in court against such facts, denying them the possibility of proposing and contributing “any means of proof that would allow them to contradict said alleged falsehoods.”
«It cannot be ignored that the aforementioned reports of the Inspection of the Bank of Spain are simple means of proof, and the analyzes and qualification of the borrowers carried out in them admit of being discussed and providing evidence to the contrary. To understand anything else would make an instruction of 12 years inexplicable, nor the disproportionate number of sessions of the oral trial, since it would be enough to qualify the facts contained in such reports and impose the corresponding penalty, which is obviously not the case,” the resolution details.
He emphasizes that “this lack of specificity” explains “the confusion in the tenor of the questions that the parties asked in the interrogations of witnesses and experts, of whom it was not clear whether the Bank of Valencia crisis or the crimes of accounting falsehood of the years 2009 and 2010.
It concludes that, in any case, none of the accusation documents detail any concealment of true data, nor the incorporation of false data in the balance sheet or in the annual accounts for the years 2009 and 2010 of the Banco de Valencia, the bases of the corporate crime that they were accused of, “the accusation being based on the disagreement of the inspectors of the Bank of Spain with some of the qualifications of borrowers and the provisions established in the balance sheets of the entity of those years.”
They were monitored by the regulator
Furthermore, he considers that “it is very difficult to appreciate in the accused the fraud of falsifying the accounts of the Banco de Valencia for the years 2009 and 2010, when all of them were aware that said banking entity was subject to an inspection.” continued by the Bank of Spain, at least since 2008, and that the inspectors were in continuous contact with the directors of the Bank of Valencia, so there was a very high probability that any “untrue data was detected.”
“Only an acquittal sentence can be handed down,” says the ruling, which recalls that the presumption of innocence requires “probative activity of the charge that is carried out in court” and is “sufficient” for the court to appreciate “the evidence of the existence, not only, of a punishable act, but also of the criminal responsibility that the accused had in it”, and understands that this is not the case.
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