The National Court sentences Alfredo Prada, former advisor to Aguirre, to seven years in prison for the Campus of Justice

The National Court has sentenced Alfredo Prada, former vice-president and former Minister of Justice of the Community of Madrid during the Government of Esperanza Aguirre, to seven years in prison for his involvement in the irregularities detected in the contracts for the concession and construction of the Campus of Justice, a complex that was left half-finished after spending more than 100 million euros on the project. The Court condemns Prada for a continued crime of prevarication in a medial contest with a continued crime of aggravated embezzlement for 24 contracts signed between 2005 and 2011 that totaled 40 million euros. The First Section of the Criminal Court condemns four employees who formed part of the management team of this project to three and a half years in prison for the same crime: Isabelino Baños (technical general director), Alicio de las Heras (financial director), Andrés Gómez Gordo (director of the Security area) and Félix José García de Castro (advising lawyer). The sixth defendant, Mariano José Sanz (technical deputy general manager), has been acquitted because the court understands that the master’s degree he enjoyed was agreed upon as compensation for his dismissal.

In its ruling, notified on Tuesday, the Court explains that Campus de la Justicia and the defendants, all of them members of the contracting committee, carried out an “intense contracting activity” in which they ignored all economic forecasts, dispensed with any cost study, evaded administrative controls by dispensing with the Legal Services of the Community of Madrid, violating the applicable regulations and outsourcing practically all the activity of the company that had a very small number of employees to carry out the task. “The contracts signed became increasingly distant from the corporate purpose and the construction of a City of Justice ceased to be the main objective” of the Ministry of Justice, the resolution indicates. According to the judges, this project became “a pretext or excuse” to celebrate all kinds of contracts whose purpose is more to “publicize” the Campus project, and especially the project commissioned to Foster & Partners, than its actual execution.

During the trial held last spring at the National Court, the former Popular Party minister, who was ousted in 2008 by Aguirre after publicly supporting Mariano Rajoy in the internal struggle for the leadership of the party, denied any illegality and the alleged embezzlement of public funds. According to Prada, the accusation, led by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, was based on the theory that part of the project’s documentation was missing, which was “destroyed” by the Community of Madrid itself, so he was forced to prove his innocence. The sentence, however, considers it proven that Prada had a “decisive participation” in contracts that in no way benefited the object for which they were supposedly signed. The judges noted multiple irregularities, among others an “absolute lack of relationship between the contracted activity and the execution of the project (such as the exhibitions organized by the Arte Viva Foundation and the chaos of contracting advertising attached to it)”; an “excessive cost that completely exceeds the economic capacity of the company; and they even warn that there are contracts that were “useless” in terms of the corporate purpose or “inadequate” for the development phase of the project for which they were signed.

According to the Court, Prada signed the 24 suspect contracts on behalf of the Ministry of Justice, and also played a “decisive” role in the selection of the successful bidders, which was carried out without the administrative procedure. The ruling explains that it was the then minister who went to London to meet with the architect Norman Foster in the steps prior to the contract and who decided to hire him “without any justification”, not so much referring to “the undoubted world prestige of the architectural firm as to the cost that this contract represented for the public coffers”.