The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has requested sentences of eight years and nine months in prison for the four alleged leaders of an institutional corruption plot that nested in the era of the extinct CDC (Democratic Convergence of Catalonia) in the public company Gestió d’Infraestructures (GISA). , which was later renamed Infraestructures de la Generalitat de Catalunya. This line of research is linked to the case 3%the alleged plot of irregular financing of the nationalist formation, and points to the fixing of “at least” a dozen contracts for the awarding of awards to a “cartel” of “trustworthy” companies that had previously “agreed” on the prices of their offers, causing “damage to public property interests,” according to the summary.
In the indictment of the public ministry, dated November 28 and to which EL PAÍS had access, Joan Lluís Quer, former president of GISA and sentenced this year to two years in prison for the Court of Barcelona for the irregular concession of projects when he was in charge of the Catalan Water Agency (ACA); and Josep Antoni Rosell, former CEO of the regional company. The harsh story of Anticorruption indicates that both “manipulated the entire process of awarding contracts”; “they abused their hierarchy”; “they pressed and gave instructions to modify the evaluations of the offers made by the technicians”; “They had a decisive influence” on the contracting tables, and even created “a new step in the process of evaluating offers in public tenders that only depended on them.”
For this reason, the Prosecutor’s Office requests eight years and nine months in prison for Quer and Rosell, whom it accuses of belonging to a criminal organization, fraud against public administrations and prevarication. The same penalty poses for two other defendants, Josep Narcís and Tamás Blay, whom he places at the same level and to whom he attributes the same crimes. These were, respectively, the president and general secretary of Asinca (Association of Independent Engineering and Consulting Companies of Catalonia), through which the engineering companies under suspicion set up the “collusive cartel” —which they called “Nuria Bofill” — which agreed on the prices and which supposedly worked in accordance with the top managers of GISA.
Anticorruption requests a sentence of six years and three months in prison for another 13 defendants, managers of engineering companies and bidders in public tenders, mainly.
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“Exclude Competitors”
The letter from the Prosecutor’s Office, signed by José Grinda, is forceful. According to him, since at least 2008 the defendants “executed an agreement to obtain the award of public administration tenders in the Catalan sphere”, for which the companies previously agreed on the prices they offered to the tenders. This maneuver, which made it possible to “exclude other competitors”, included “coordination” meetings and regular communications “through email accounts owned by the name of the group, Nuria Bofill”.
“For years they agreed on the rules or guidelines to follow when applying for tenders from certain administrations, with the aim of avoiding free competition and, thus, obtaining a more beneficial contract than the one they would have obtained under equal conditions,” continues Anticorruption. Said pact, he points out, “was extended” to other public bodies, such as Regs de Catalunya SA (Regsa), the Catalan Water Agency, Aigües del Ter Llobregat, Barcelona City Council, the Tarragona Aigües Consortium, Túnels i Accessos de Barcelona (Tabasa), Infraestructures Ferroviàries de Catalunya (Ifercat) and the Territorial Service of Roads and Railways of the Generalitat.
This line of research (called Infrastructure Piece) is linked to the case 3% —for which 30 people have already been sent to the bench, in addition to the CDC and the PDeCAT as legal entities— and it began in the Court of First Instance and Instruction of El Vendrell (Tarragona), which followed the lead on the award by de Infraestructures of certain contracts in exchange for the payment of commissions between 2008 and 2015. These investigations landed in the National Court in 2018, which assumed the case. Two years later, in the summer of 2020, the investigating judge José de la Mata ordered the 17 implicated to be prosecuted. Now, once the indictments are filed, the court must decide whether to open an oral trial.
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