The Supreme Court has essentially confirmed the ruling that financially condemned the Popular Party for the reform of its headquarters paid for with opaque money from its ‘box B’. The judges have partially upheld some appeals and reduced the prison sentences of both Luis Bárcenas and the partners of the company that carried out the works at Génova 13, as well as the defrauded fees, but they maintain the proven facts and the financial amount of which The Popular Party must respond as a subsidiary civil party.
In the case of the architect Gonzalo Urquijo and his partner Belén García, their sentences of two years and nine months in prison are reduced to nine months, which in practice opens the door to them not having to necessarily enter prison to serve their sentence. In the case of Bárcenas, he is reduced from two years in prison to eight months. And at a general level, the tax defrauded in the entire operation drops from 873,000 euros to 374,000, although the conviction of the Popular Party as a subsidiary civil party “is maintained” to take charge of part of the evaded tax payments, in the event that the convicted persons do not do so, since it was not appealed to the Supreme Court.
The sentence of the National Court imposed two years in prison on Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of the PP, for paying more than one million euros to the unified company to renovate the party’s headquarters at number 13 Génova Street in Madrid. Money that came from parallel accounting and that was used to renovate seven floors of the building, basements and garages between 2005 and 2010. All in black money, according to the judges: “Apart from billing and official accounting and not declared to the public treasury.
In addition to the former treasurer of the PP, those responsible for the company that carried out the reform were sentenced for tax fraud to two years and nine months in prison: the architect Gonzalo Urquijo and his partner Belén García. The PP was also condemned as subsidiary civilly responsible for part of the tax fraud: of the 123,669 euros that Unifica stopped paying in 2007 for Corporate Tax after having collected black money from the party’s coffers and, therefore, unbeknownst to Tax authorities. The governing bodies of the PP at that time, said the Court, did not exercise “adequate control” over the management of Bárcenas and their measures to prevent this type of situation were, at that time, non-existent. The party had to respond financially for that part of the fraud, added the sentence now essentially ratified by the Supreme Court, since Bárcenas acted “as manager of said political formation.”
The Supreme Court has upheld part of Gonzalo Urquijo’s appeal against his conviction. He rejects that the case was statute-barred but does recognize that the eight years it took for him to be sentenced since the opening of proceedings should be considered a simple mitigating circumstance for undue delays. It also removes the architect and the rest of the accused from the crime of falsification for which they had been convicted when they understood that the invoices and certifications provided were not simulated even though they had inaccurate data: “What is simulated is the amount, not the document” and its “lack of truthfulness” is limited to “some points”, far from what is required to be a crime of falsehood.
The ruling does not modify the numbers that affect the Popular Party even if it reduces the defrauded fees. The partial estimate of Urquijo’s appeal also reduces the tax fraud perpetrated by the UNIFICA company to less than half: from more than 873,000 euros to 384,000, well above the threshold of tax crime. But the defrauded quota for which Bárcenas and the PP are held subsidiary responsible, of 123,669 euros, is not modified.
Sentence reductions at the criminal level do have a lot of immediate relevance for the accused. In the case of Gonzalo Urquijo and his partner Belén García, the criminal sanction no longer implies mandatory imprisonment, going from two years and nine months to only nine months in prison.
Box B and the Bárcenas papers
This is not the first ruling that certifies the existence of a black money box in the Popular Party, but it was the first that ruled on the veracity of the parallel accounting kept by its treasurer: the known as ‘Bárcenas papers’. “Certain notes or exit annotations have been corroborated with other evidence, which leads us to conclude that the papers record events that in part are real,” he says.
That resolution, now declared firm in essence, stated that Luis Bárcenas “managed the cash funds contributed to the Popular Party political formation as private donations through parallel accounting – B accounting – whose income and expenditure was not recorded in official accounting. And Bárcenas’ papers, he added, “reflect events whose reality has been proven, such as transfers to official donation accounts, deliveries of money to certain people linked to the PP or payments for reform works.”
Not everyone appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court. Luis Bárcenas, for example, did not appeal his two-year prison sentence. The Popular Party, still with Pablo Casado at the helm, presented allegations before the Criminal Chamber against Bárcenas’ conviction and its own, but withdrew it shortly after the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo to the presidency of the party.
This is not the first final ruling on the different ramifications of the Gürtel corruption case, an investigation that began more than 15 years ago in the National Court. An open case around municipalities and public administrations controlled by the PP where businessmen of the plot led by Francisco Correa benefited from million-dollar awards in exchange for bribes and gifts to party politicians.
This is the seventh firm resolution of the Supreme Court that declares the symbiotic relationship between the PP and the corrupt plot proven for years. The last one was issued at the end of last year when the high court confirmed that the match was financed with 200,000 euros from Gürtel in Boadilla del Monte, one of its fiefdoms in Madrid.
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