The untouchables of the PP after 20 years of corruption

This PP politician has been involved for years on a path in life where everything is dangerous curves. Ruin fell upon him due to corruption and soon he will sit on the bench threatened with jail. With the experience of the time he has been trapped in the courts, he now tells EL PAÍS that justice is not the same for everyone: “Bosses are untouchable. It is not the same to take you ahead of [Luis] Bárcenas than Mariano [Rajoy]”.

It is just an opinion, although the facts partially confirm its verdict. Since the most corrupt governments of the PP began to suffer the consequences of their actions -2018, the first ruling in the Gürtel case-, all the heads-presidents of this political formation have emerged unscathed from the judicial ordeal.

Justice has not been able in all this time to penalize the behavior of these untouchables. “Judges should ask themselves who benefits from corruption in parties and governments. And they would come to the conclusion that the main beneficiaries are: candidates in the campaign first and presidents of the Government later,” says the politician prosecuted for corruption.

The PP, sentenced on two occasions as a lucrative participant in the crimes committed by the same plot, has accumulated numerous convictions in the last six years for the corruption of its public officials. But no court ruling has yet hit its main leaders.

The last known ruling on a proven case of rigged contracts in favor of the Gürtel network acquitted Francisco Camps, president of the Valencian Community between 2003 and 2011, last Wednesday. Despite the fact that the businessman who benefited, and was convicted, confessed to the facts -” I asked Camps to help me and he helped me” – the court did not find definitive proof of the crime: neither Camps gave the order to hire nor signed any document that could incriminate him. Other Camps Government officials have been convicted of these events.

Many years before (2012), Camps was already acquitted in another trial for alleged bribery in the suit case. A jury of nine considered him “not guilty” by 5 to 4. And this despite the fact that the investigation proved with invoices and testimonies that the corrupt plot paid for the suits to the then president and despite the fact that Camps failed to prove the payment of a single one. of the suits. His vice president, Víctor Campos, confessed the facts, returned the suits that the corrupt plot gave him and was sentenced for improper passive bribery to pay a fine. This corrupt plot was enriched for years on account of dozens of contracts rigged by the Camps Government, who resigned before facing the trial of the suits.

Since that acquittal ruling until today, the National Court and the Superior Court of Justice of Valencia have condemned numerous leaders and public officials of the Valencian PP, many of them Camps’ main collaborators. But those punishments never touched the boss. The subordinates always took the blame.

On this issue, Alberto Jorge Barreiro, a Supreme Court judge who retired on April 30, 2019, developed a curious theory. Barreiro’s dissenting vote against a sentence that reduced the sentence of Jaume Matas, former president of the Balearic Islands, exposed the different yardsticks of measuring the blame in cases of political corruption: “In this type of hierarchical structures, the circumstance occurs that the lower the decision-making and competence capacity of an official, the closer he usually is to the materialization of criminal conduct and the greater the possibility of incurring in the formal execution of typical behavior (…) Thus, on many occasions, the serious contradiction occurs that the person responsible for the criminal action is condemned as a mere participant in the crime and who is a mere executor of the commands of a superior, competent and disciplinaryly, he is condemned as an authentic author.”

Isabel Gallego, general director of Media of the Community of Madrid during the presidencies of Esperanza Aguirre and Ignacio González, suffers the consequences that Judge Barreiro denounced. Gallego is prosecuted in the Púnica case for prevarication and embezzlement. “They accuse me of embezzling from her by hiring jobs that benefited her (Esperanza Aguirre),” Gallego indicated in the appeal to try to get rid of her on the bench. The PP of the Community of Madrid was illegally financed between 2007 and 2011 through a box b supplied by contracting businessmen. With that money, undeclared electoral acts were paid to the Court of Accounts and other services to improve the image of their presidents.

An autonomous leader, a colleague of Isabel Gallego in the Aguirre Government, tells it like this: “The communications director is being prosecuted for looking for a way to fit a contract so that Esperanza Aguirre would look beautiful on social networks. Gallego goes ahead in court while the one who comes out pretty is at her house.”

The two prosecutors who investigated the Púnica case for years refused to sign the final Anti-Corruption document, written by a colleague who arrived later and exonerated Aguirre. The president of the regional government and the PP of Madrid thus escaped a summary in which the Prosecutor’s Office also requests prison for the general secretary of the PP-Madrid, Francisco Granados, and for the manager of the PP-Madrid, Beltrán Gutiérrez, both workers at Aguirre’s orders.

The former Madrid president has, for the moment, escaped all the legal cases open to her Government. Her vice president Ignacio González spent eight months in preventive detention and is awaiting trial. Francisco Granados, former counselor and former general secretary of the PP-Madrid, spent 33 months in prison and is awaiting trial. Another vice president, Alfredo Prada, is being tried for the management of the City of Justice, a pharaonic work bogged down after an investment of more than 200 million. His Sports Councilor and Deputy Presidential Councilor, Alberto López Viejo, was sentenced to 27 years in prison for the Gürtel case, a plot that was enriched by hundreds of rigged contracts from the Community of Madrid. General directors and mayors from the period when Aguirre was the head of everything in the Madrid PP have been convicted, prosecuted or charged in various cases.

It is a balance similar to the one Camps presents as head of the Valencian PP and the Executive that he presided over. The result of his management can be followed through a dozen judicial rulings to draw some conclusions: there were eight years of proven corruption in almost all areas of the Valencian Executive that Camps directed. The leadership of his Government – a vice president, several advisors and general directors – and of his party – secretary and deputy secretary general, manager, treasurer – have been convicted in different open cases for corruption. Electoral campaigns with Camps as candidate far exceeded the legal expenses allowed; Many acts were financed through false invoices or payments in b that were assumed by businessmen who were contractors of the Government presided over by Camps; some ministries and public companies awarded rigged contracts to the corrupt plot; Until the Pope’s visit, it was used by Valencian public television, directed by a trusted man of Camps – also sentenced to prison – to enrich the Gürtel network. But Camps “knows nothing, remembers nothing, recognizes nothing,” wrote Judge José Manuel Vázquez Honrubia, rapporteur of the sentence that punished 18 people, including politicians and businessmen, with prison sentences for the illegal financing of the Valencian PP.

Judge
Vázquez Honrubia suspected Camps but could do nothing: “It is legally impossible to issue any ruling on the matter because in this trial he appears [Camps] as a witness, so it is obvious according to the formal accusatory principle that not even a mere value judgment can be made about his conduct.”

Nor could anyone make a value judgment about the conduct of José María Aznar during the 14 years (1990-2004) that he presided over a party illegally financed with anonymous donations from public contractors used to pay bonuses in b: “I never knew anything, and I say that there is no box b of the Popular Party, I affirm it.” Mariano Rajoy, Aznar’s successor, also denied knowing about that box B that fed the party for almost 20 years: “It is absolutely false.”

But the courts have denied them in at least two rulings. The last one, from the National Court regarding box b with which the party paid for part of the works on its headquarters, will be confirmed in the coming days by the Supreme Court. The only person convicted in that case has been Luis Bárcenas, the former treasurer who declared to the judge that box b operated with the knowledge and consent of the party presidents.

In the case of the illegal financing of the Valencian PP, the judge sentenced the general secretary, Ricardo Costa, whom he considered “the man behind it,” defined as the person who “without intervening in the execution has clear control over the situation, having as such the possibility of making it stop at any time.

The man behind is not always visible to the judges. A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court accepted the accusation of terrorism against the former Catalan president, Carles Puigdemont, arguing that he had enough power to control the independence movements and thus avoid the violent demonstration held at the airport against the ruling of the process. To argue this decision, five Supreme Court justices also made reference to the theory of the man behind it: “The order to commit specific crimes does not need to be proven, given that whoever is at the head of the chain can also be accused by the omission to control the apparatus of power, which could and should be done.”

Aznar and Rajoy, presidents of a party that operated with a coffer of eight million undeclared euros for 20 years, stated that their functions did not include control of the party’s accounts. The Supreme Court has theories, applied to Puigdemont, that dismantle this attempt at exculpation.

The political and police leadership of the Ministry of the Interior executed between 2012 and 2016, during the mandate of the PP Government; dozens of illegal operations consisting of the persecution of political adversaries without judicial authorization, sometimes fabricating false evidence to attribute crimes that were never committed. Among these operations was also the espionage of the family of Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of the PP, with the intention of stealing documents that could incriminate the Government of Mariano Rajoy in illegal practices. For all these reasons, Judge Manuel García Castellón has prosecuted half a dozen police commissioners, some already retired, the former Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández; and the former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez.

Rajoy, Jorge Fernández’s boss during the time that the police leadership did dirty work in favor of the Government he presided over, was never investigated in this case. The former PP politician who is risking his future in an upcoming trial is clear: “It is not the same to take down Bárcenas as it is to take down Mariano.”

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