They say that Eduardo Zaplana received a tip that he was going to be arrested but he did not believe it. It was in 2018 when, after three decades in politics and after his time as president of the Generalitat Valenciana and the Ministry of Labor, he did not imagine that he could fall into the networks of justice as had happened to a dozen his advisors, investigated for corruption.
Zaplana, born in Cartagena 67 years ago, became mayor of Benidorm in 1991 with the vote of a turncoat. It coincided with the moment in which he began to become famous for appearing in a recording of another alleged corruption case in which he was heard saying that he needed a lot of money to live. After that she polished herself. He became a clever politician and trickster. He embarked the Valencian Community in the era of large projects that marked the beginning of the great regional debt. For decades he was untouchable. He controlled everything, he left nothing to chance, he surrounded himself with loyalists who accompanied him in his career.
But that image of omnipotence, of impunity, was broken a little over five years ago, when he was arrested accused of prevarication, bribery and falsification of documents, among other crimes, for the alleged bribes received after the awarding of two major services: public concessions. of the ITV and the wind farms of the Valencian Community. Only that day, when Zaplana was one of the few missed by the arrest, his eternal smile was erased from his rarely pale face. He was in provisional prison for nine months, at which time the judge investigating the case decided to release him after blocking 6.3 million euros in Switzerland and after five requests for freedom in which he alleged the leukemia he suffers from.
Starting Thursday, Eduardo Zaplana will sit on the dock for the first time for the so-called wasteland case. And he will do so during the almost 30 sessions that the trial will last in which the alleged network created, with people he completely trusts, will be put under the magnifying glass to collect commissions, launder them and return to Spain those illicit benefits with which they were acquired. apartments, boats, plots, vehicles, among others, as accused by Anticorruption. The Prosecutor's Office is asking José María Aznar's former minister for 19 years in prison for the 20.6 million euros that the investigation estimates were mobilized by the organization to which he also blames the crime of being a criminal group.
The origin of the research: Five typewritten and crossed-out sheets were the origin of the investigation. These were found, according to the Prosecutor's Office, by a Syrian citizen, who lived in a house that had belonged to Zaplana, and who gave them to Marcos Benavent, known as the money junkie after beginning to collaborate with justice. in solving several corruption plots. The pages were, according to Anticorruption, a summary of the procedures carried out to obtain the concessions for the ITV and the wind farms with the amounts that the bidders had to pay to obtain the awards.
The accused: In addition to Zaplana, another former president of the Generalitat, José Luis Olivas, will sit on the bench, whom the Prosecutor's Office attributes to having concluded the rigged bidding process and having collected part of the bribe, 580,000 euros. In fact, Olivas was already convicted of falsifying documents and against the public treasury because, to justify the payment of that alleged bribe made by the Cotinos, a false invoice was created for the alleged payment of fees for work that never existed.
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Also on that bench will be an alleged front man for Zaplana, one of his childhood friends, Miguel Barceló; the alleged financial mastermind of the plot, Francisco Grau, the secretary of the former Minister of Labor, Mitsouko Henríquez, his former chief of staff, Juan Francisco García, and the businessmen brothers Vicente and José Cotino Escrivá, family of the former director general of the Police Juan Cotino.
Concessions and commissions: The investigation, in the hands of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, ensures that the tenders for the awards were designed by establishing “subjective conditions” in order for the Cotino companies to win the tenders “because they had with the necessary informative information on the conditions and requirements favorable to its granting, to the detriment of the rest of the possible competitors, limiting competition as much as possible and, ultimately, creating the conditions in the highest level political bodies for it to be possible”. In its report, the Prosecutor's Office points out that after the awards, the Cotino group of companies sold shares in the dealerships that earned them 86.5 million euros “which justifies the high amount of the commissions.”
The operation: The plot moved the money from the bribes through tax havens such as Luxembourg, Panama or Andorra. And, for the return to Spain, “a corporate structure was designed in charge of collecting criminal funds and transforming them through different mechanisms that aim to hide their origin and ownership to introduce the cash into the financial circuit, taking advantage of the organization of illegally obtained profits.”
The “absent” Zaplana: The now former regional president and former Minister of Labor was extremely careful not to formally appear in the companies that are part of the plot. “In the creation and management of the companies, the participation of Eduardo Zaplana remains hidden, who does not formally appear in the records of any of the companies, although he is present in the meetings that shape their constitution and in the decisions that are made. “, says the prosecutor for whom, according to the investigation, all indications point to the fact that the popular leader was the one who directed the network and who benefited from the bites.
The diversity of witnesses: The list of witnesses who will pass through the room of the fourth section of the Provincial Court of Valencia, which judges the case as there is no accused with a public position that would make him certified, is very diverse. Zaplana employees will pass by, like the woman who cleaned in one of the apartments bought in Madrid with supposedly illicit funds and who assured that he was the only one who lived in the property and who paid her even though it was never listed in her name. The niece of the spy Francisco Paesa, who for three years was in charge of creating companies in Luxembourg to receive more than 10 million euros from Spain and Switzerland and of supposedly illicit origin, is also called to testify. Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo will also testify, who raised doubts in an investigative commission, when asked by the PP itself, about the socialists' interest in “destroying Mr. Zaplana.”
The Confessed Bleacher: One of the main assets of the prosecution is the testimony of Fernando Belhot, the Uruguayan lawyer who replaced Paesa and who was in charge of the “fiscal optimization” of the network's assets and who, he said, always knew that Zaplana, with the which met several times a year, was behind the operation. Belhot delivered 6.7 million euros to the asset recovery office (ORGA), which is supposedly part of the 20 million that Anti-Corruption believes were received fraudulently.
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