Manuel Hurtado faces a request for four years in prison for prevarication, fraud and falsehood
The trial for the so-called “Sports Center case”, whose investigation began more than fourteen years ago to investigate the alleged illegalities in the adjudication and construction of the José Antonio Camacho de Ceutí sports complex, will start this coming Tuesday at the Provincial Court of Murcia, with the former socialist mayor Manuel Hurtado as the main defendant. The former mayor, who remained in office for almost three decades, faces a request for four years in prison for alleged crimes of prevarication, fraud, false documentation and subsidy fraud. He will be accompanied on the bench by three municipal officials and the two representatives of the construction company that built the José Antonio Camacho sports complex.
Hurtado already appeared at the headquarters of the Provincial Court in October 2020, when he was offered the possibility of settling for a sentence of only one year and four months in prison. Likewise, he was “forgiven” the payment of compensation of 548,150 euros, which he would have had to pay jointly and severally with the firm ECI SL, which was the successful bidder for the works, although it should have paid 270,000 euros.
The advantageous agreement proposed by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office forced the former mayor and senator of the PSOE to confess guilt of having verbally awarded the works of the aforementioned sports center, in 2003, “knowingly ignoring all kinds of administrative procedure”, as attributed by the Ministry Public. But the former mayor rejected the agreement and this week he will finally face trial for those acts.
The prosecutor will maintain that the contracting of the sports complex was set at almost 1.9 million euros, allegedly personally between Hurtado and the representatives of the winning company, “without any record of contracting, nor any budget item, nor petitions of other offers to obtain a lower price, nor prior control of any kind by the Municipal Intervention, nor agreement of the Local Government Board approving the specifications, nor copies of publication in the BORM, nor act of opening tenders , no offers submitted, no patrimonial record of the plot, no certificate of reconsideration or completion of work in 2003».
It was later, already “after the last whistle”, when the then mayor Hurtado presumably ordered his officials to process the file for the award of that contract, despite the fact that by that time the works were already completed and even inaugurated.