This Friday, the Astapa case has consummated its reduction to something quite small, in any case nothing comparable to what was once thought. None of the 15 convicted in a case that amounted to 103 investigated will go to jail and the fines, in total, barely reach four million euros. There are 31 acquitted. Antonio Barrientos, then mayor of Estepona (PSOE) has been sentenced to five months of suspension from employment or public office and a fine of 40,000 euros for a continued crime of passive bribery. That is, for receiving some “gift, which we will see in the sentence what it refers to,” he said at the exit.
More than 16 years after the Police broke into the town hall following the trail of what was supposed to be a plot of urban corruption similar to the scandal that was already plaguing Jesús Gil’s Marbella, it has been settled (safe from possible resources) with the reading of the ruling. We will have to wait a few days to know the details of the sentence, which has more than 3,000 pages.
“It has become clear that this has been an aberration and atrocity,” something “indecent,” Barrientos commented at the exit. He always defended his innocence. The sentence is barely a fraction of what he once faced, but he has explained that he is not happy because he has been sentenced, and that he will appeal. “The first impression of the sentence is that there is nothing of what was reported,” he said, also attacking the Prosecutor’s Office. “I could put my foot in it, but I never put my hand in it,” he had said before.
Minor convictions
The reading in the Third Section of the Provincial Court of Malaga has confirmed what was already intuited: in these two years it has not been proven that the corruption plot around the Estepona city council was of the magnitude that was initially assumed, and which the prosecutor also noted in his indictment, from 2018. In addition, the delays have deflated it even more. The court has been judging this matter for a year and ten months after 15 years of investigation, and has applied to all the accused the highly qualified mitigating circumstance of undue delays.
Only eight of the 37 have been sentenced to prison terms, of one month and fifteen days in most cases. Six will be replaced with a fine. Those who receive the greatest sentence, José Ignacio Crespo and Juan Jesús López, are sentenced to six and five months in prison, a sentence that, being less than two and a half years, will most likely be suspended.
Last July, when he was scheduled for sentencing, all the defendants saw how the prosecutor drastically reduced their requests for conviction after more than a year in the dock. At first, the Prosecutor’s Office requested 205 years in prison and the payment of 184 million euros in bail among all the accused in its indictment, signed in 2018. When the trial arrived, it requested more than two and a half years in prison, the limit below which the sentence is usually suspended, for 33 defendants. When he finished, he only held that bar for two. And the sentence has left it at zero.
Nor do the fines stand up to comparison with the figures that were used. There are five sentences that include a lump sum payment of 728,789.84 euros, but the majority are sentenced to pay 450 euros.
A trial marked by the shadow of Villarejo at the origin of the case
It has been 17 years since the UDEF began investigating suspicions of urban corruption in Estepona, a neighboring municipality of Marbella, and more than 16 since police officers broke into the town hall with a court order and took away papers and dozens of arrests. , among them the then mayor, Antonio Barrientos. Before learning of the ruling, the former councilor has described the process as “inhuman” and an “ordeal” for him and his family. “A justice that works with these parameters is no longer justice. Who gives us back the past tense?
The Astapa case, which in its initial phase was compared to Malaya due to the number of defendants (more than a hundred), the money allegedly diverted (the Prosecutor’s Office even requested 284 million euros in bail in its first indictment) and The documentary volume (351,114 pages in 774 volumes -128 main and 646 documentary pieces-) has been deflating over the years and, particularly, since the trial began in January 2023.
By July 29, when it was heard for sentencing, the Prosecutor’s Office had narrowed its accusation to 37 people out of the fifty whom it began accusing almost two years ago. The penalties he requested had also been drastically reduced for all of them. Only two faced more than two and a half years in prison, the limit under which courts usually suspend sentences if there is no criminal record. For Barrientos he requested two years in prison and a 40,000 euro fine. At the beginning of the trial he asked for ten years and nine months and a million fine, in addition to 28 million in civil liability. No longer civil liability, because the Estepona city council withdrew from the process when the trial began.
The alleged involvement of retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo distorted the trial, at times focused on his figure (despite not being accused) and ended up lowering the expectation of conviction from the first hour, when the magistrates annulled the wiretapping, questioning the origin of the case. The doubts were in the report on the agreements that constituted the core of Astapa, which were discovered to be mere “papers” with no known author, signature or date. A document that did not contain any “minimally serious” indication and that served to launch the case as support for a complaint filed with the UDEF of Madrid, directed by José Luis Olivera, who has been linked to Villarejo.
Once the operation broke out, the controversial commissioner, with urban planning interests in Estepona, managed to place a person he trusted in charge of Urban Planning, to whom he gave instructions that were reflected in his recordings and his agenda.
Many years later, there is a ruling on the case that put Estepona on the map of alleged urban corruption.
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