The last major corruption trial on the Costa del Sol, with 50 defendants and which delves into the irregular financing that surrounded the Estepona City Council between 2003 and 2008, has started with surprise. If already the volume of the so-called Astapa case forced to divide the procedure into ten thematic blocks, the Prosecutor’s Office requested this Monday that a new one be added, the eleventh, focused on the origin of the investigation and the evidence. It is a way of opening the door to the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, whom the main defendant, Antonio Barrientos, former mayor of Estepona, accuses of having “a clear influence” on the police officers who began the operation, as his lawyer expressed this Monday. , María Gutiérrez, who has requested the annulment “of the instruction in its entirety.” All the lawyers who have had a turn to speak have joined the petition.
The trial started an hour late. It was not easy to organize the 40 defendants present – the rest were connected by telematic means – who are being tried for the crimes of falsehood, fraud, embezzlement, bribery, prevarication and influence peddling. Neither did his lawyers. The private accusations were not presented – such as that of the Estepona City Council itself – and there was hardly any public and the media presence ended with a dozen professionals. The court tries to clarify responsibilities in an alleged plot concocted to underestimate urban agreements in Estepona (74,493 inhabitants) with the aim of financing both the municipality and the political parties, in addition to the personal enrichment of the members of the network. All this at the beginning of the 21st century, the time of the balls in the urbanism of the Malaga coast that also splashed other municipalities in the area such as Marbella, Manilva, Casares or Ronda.
The main visible head of the Astapa case It’s Antonio Barrientos. When the photographers entered room four of the Provincial Court of Málaga, the same one where the malaya case, he got up to go to the bathroom. The ex-regidor, who spent six months in prison, thus made sure to appear in the image. He has been one of the defendants who has most publicly defended his innocence. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor requests for him a sentence of ten years and nine months in prison, disqualification from public employment for a period of 38 years and a fine. His is one of the largest prison requests in the case, along with those of Pedro López, former urban planning manager of the Estepona City Council and Francisco Zamorano, who was mayor of the Economy and Finance, to whom the Public Prosecutor requests 11 years behind bars .
The prosecutor has also requested the free dismissal of two defendants for the prescription of the crimes of bribery of which they were accused. It is one more example of the slowness of justice in this case, whose first trial session began 16 years after the investigation began and almost 15 after the first arrests were made —in June 2008. The Prosecutor’s Office itself, in its indictment, recognized the application of the mitigation of undue delay for those defendants who are convicted.
Judicial sources believe that the case, which came to have more than a hundred defendants, will end up diluting due to the time elapsed since its inception and its complexity. Also due to the chronic lack of resources awarded to a matter that has 128 main volumes with 351,114 pages and 646 documentary pieces. For the sentence it will be necessary to use patience. If this week and next week the previous questions will be addressed, the testing phase will start on March 7 and will continue every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from there. It will last, at least, until the summer.
The volume of the case and the number of defendants made it necessary to divide the trial into ten thematic blocks. The types of agreements, urban development actions, bank deposits in Switzerland and Andorra, commission payments or municipal concessions are some of them. This Monday the prosecutor Valentín Bueno has requested the inclusion of the eleventh: the origin of the investigation.
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His request is the same one that the defenses have claimed on numerous occasions, questioning the origin of the investigation and, therefore, requesting the annulment of the entire process. This is what Antonio Barrientos’ lawyer, María Gutiérrez, has done, who has argued for an hour that she requests that annulment for the violation of different rights, to which other lawyers have joined. The secrecy of communications —since the lawyer understands that the police wiretaps were adopted without indications of criminality or judicial control— or the right of defense when the court did not accept some evidence, are some of the examples offered by Gutiérrez, who has Mentioned Villarejo on numerous occasions, accusing him of “instrumentalization from the beginning of the police investigation.”
“He achieved what he wanted: to have a clear influence on the urban planning of Estepona and to carry out a manipulation of the instruction through the influence of the officials of the UDEF [Unidad de Delitos Económicos y Fiscales de la Policía Nacional], who made the first 13 reports of this operation,” said the lawyer who was reprimanded several times by the president of the court, Andrés Rodero. “You have been asking for 20 minutes for almost an hour, what a brevity!” He snapped at him last time. The trial will continue tomorrow.
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