The former president of the Ourense Provincial Council and current senator of the PP, José Manuel Baltar Blanco, is a little closer to the dock since this Thursday. Supreme Court magistrate Ana Ferrer has issued an order in which she proposes trying the politician for a crime against road safety for allegedly driving a car at 215 kilometers per hour in April last year on a section of the A-52 highway near Asturianos (Zamora) where the maximum speed allowed is 120.
The instructor has transferred the proceedings to the Prosecutor’s Office so that, within a period of 10 days, it may request the dismissal of the case or the opening of the oral trial by formulating a document of accusation. When the case was being processed in a court in Zamora – before he was elected senator and, therefore, before he became qualified – the public ministry was already asking for a six-month fine at a rate of 10 euros per day and one year of withdrawal of the driving license.
In his resolution, Ferrer emphasizes that, from “a simple reading of the facts”, it is concluded that the behavior of the PP senator is one of those that the law contemplates as “deserving of criminal reproach, insofar as it is statistically more risky for security.” in road traffic. This is based on the logic that it impermissibly increases the risk of personal and material damage if someone drives at a speed higher than the established limits,” the judge emphasizes. And he adds that “the imputation, both objective in relation to the facts, and subjective in relation to the intervention of the investigated person in them, is based on the data incorporated into the report” by the Civil Guard, as well as the successive extensions that the armed institute agents did.
The regulations establish that the violation of speeding on interurban roads is a crime against traffic safety if the maximum speed allowed by the regulations is exceeded by more than 80 kilometers per hour. However, it contemplates a margin of error in the radars which, according to the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence, is 5% in fixed radars, as was the case with the device that captured Baltar’s infraction. Despite this reduction, which left his speed that day at 204 kilometers per hour, the popular senator would have exceeded by four kilometers the excess of 80 that marks the limit to be considered a crime.
The event that has put Baltar on the brink of the bench occurred on the afternoon of April 23, 2023, when the Galician leader of the PP was driving an official car on the A-52 at a speed much higher than the permitted speed. The Civil Guard stopped him and punished him with a fine of 600 euros and the withdrawal of six points from his driving license. It was 6:40 p.m. According to sources from the Government Subdelegation in Zamora, initially the matter was processed as an administrative infraction, but the armed institute verified that Baltar’s excessive speed fell within the limits to be considered an alleged crime against road safety and He sent him to justice. At first, the case fell on a court in the province where the crime was committed, but after it was proven that the former leader of the Orense PP had become a member of the Senate and, therefore, qualified, it went to the Supreme Court.
Baltar, who when the infraction was revealed, attributed it to a “mistake,” testified before Judge Ferrar last December. He then denied that he was driving at the speed reflected in the report and opposed the Supreme Court’s investigation with the argument that he had already paid a fine for the administrative infraction and that, therefore, in his opinion, the file should have been archived. . The judge, with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, rejected his allegations and continued with the case. In March, the Supreme Court requested a request from the Senate to be able to act against him.
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This incident has already partly cost Baltar his position in the Ourense Provincial Council, from which he resigned in June, two months after the event, to facilitate this body having a president of the PP, as he argued after leaving office. The popular party had lost the absolute majority in the province in the municipal elections of 28-M last year and, to maintain power, depended on a pact with the independent party Democracia Ourensana, led by Gonzalo Pérez Jácome, mayor of the provincial capital. . The investigation into the alleged crime against security complicated the pact and the popular leader then stepped aside.
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