The court allows the DEFEX arms company to be both accused and accused in the trial for the contracts in Cameroon

The Prosecutor's Office applauds the fact that the company's new management promoted a "culture of legality and regulatory compliance"

MADRID, 3 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The court of the National Court that judges alleged irregularities of DEFEX and its former commercial director Manuel Iglesias in contracts with Cameroon has decided that the semi-public arms company, which is accused in this first trial, can also act as a private prosecution, that is, as harmed.

In the previous session, DEFEX's defense had requested that the company go from being accused to only being harmed, alleging that the new management discovered the alleged facts. The prosecutor has shared that double condition, but not that he stops being accused.

Alfonso Guevara, the magistrate who presides over the court, has ruled this Thursday that DEFEX will remain on the bench and that it will be able to appear as an injured party, thus giving it a double condition, "regardless of whether throughout the procedure and in the sentence it can be determined if it existed or not a detriment."

The court has also resolved that the statement of the accused be made at the end of the trial, once the test has been carried out.

Previously, in the continuation of the previous issues, the Prosecutor's Office had opposed DEFEX being left out of the defendant's dock, as the semi-public company had requested, which considers that as its activity is of general economic interest and public policy, the Penal Code freed her from criminal liability.

His defense argued that the alleged irregular contracts were made before a reform of the Penal Code that, until 2015, had exempted the State, public administrations and state-owned commercial companies that carried out public functions of interest to the general economy from criminal liability.

To this claim of DEFEX, the prosecutor has responded by assuring that it is "very difficult" for a company that carries out an activity of general economic interest or public policies "to be compatible with what it has carried out" with its partner and commercial Philippe Bourcier, "fugitive of Justice and with international arrest warrants, unless such behavior enters into a legal schizophrenia".

And he has specified that he does not question the origin and commercial purposes of DEFEX, but rather puts the magnifying glass on the alleged criminal activities of the company not only in this piece related to Cameroon, but also in those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Brazil.

The representative of the Public Ministry has indicated that the allegedly criminal acts go beyond 2015, since in 2016 there was a DEFEX management committee that made the "decision" to pay a Bourcier company and there is a subsequent email in the that a senior official wondered if the payment had been made.

According to the prosecutor, the company's policy was to obtain contracts "on a commission basis and, from there, there were the subcontractors who benefited from the operation." "There is no such activity of general economic interest in these contracts, but rather there is an impoverishment of the State itself," he stated.

The "illicit" commissions, he continued, "cover up" international bribery, the enrichment of Bourcier, an embezzlement of public funds and damage to the semi-public arms company.

In this sense, the prosecutor has supported that the investigating judge granted DEFEX, even though it is accused as a legal entity, the status of private prosecution, since it has indicated that if the former management, involved in alleged cases of corruption, was "disloyal" and committed crimes, this does not detract from the fact that the new administrators introduced a "culture of legality and regulatory compliance" that allows him to have that dual position.

"The facts subject to prosecution are not part of an exclusion of criminal responsibility", the prosecutor has settled, to ask the court to be "very restrictive" with that request.

Resolved the previous questions, the court has given way to the witnesses. In today's session, a former financial director of DEFEX declared that he attributed to Manuel Iglesias the responsibility of establishing the commissions paid to intermediaries.

"I did not calculate them, they were given to me", assured the witness, who has indicated that he made the payments after being justified by the commercial director. "I checked the formal part of the documentation and if it was correct, they paid," he said.

Asked about a contract of almost 100 million euros for a coastal surveillance service and for which Iglesias would have agreed with Bourcier premiums of five million, the witness explained that the financing model "allowed a 5 percent commission."

"What a commission agent wants is to get paid if it helps you achieve a goal," commented the company's former chief financial officer, before stating that relations with Bourcier were not new, but had existed for "quite a while" for other contracts .

The former financial director has assured that without local support in Cameroon the contract could not have been obtained, which left DEFEX a profit margin of "10 percent, more or less". And he has added that the commissions were paid if the objectives were met and that all the DEFEX audits were clean, "without exceptions".

For her part, a former head of coordination and execution has said that there were many meetings with Bourcier, who showed up to see how the operations were going after Iglesias left the company, which has been in the process of being dissolved since 2017 due to these accusations.

The witness has reported that, "later", Bourcier asked "sometime" why the commissions were not paid to him and everything came after a change in management. As he has described, at first he did not take "seriously" that intermediaries had to justify the objectives achieved and he was not "agree" with that requirement.

For the alleged irregular contracts, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office requests sentences of between 18 and 23 years in prison for the former commercial director of DEFEX and two other defendants, the president of the commercial Grupo Aresa Internacional, Óscar López, and the commercial director of Deimos Space SLU, Francisco Luque.

In this piece, alleged crimes of corruption in international commercial transactions, embezzlement of public funds, money laundering and documentary falsification are judged in this piece of the so-called 'Defex case', which has other trials pending.

Here it is about the contracts signed in Cameroon between 2005 and 2013, when the commercial agent Bourcier, with the "main and determining" participation of Iglesias as commercial director, acted as an intermediary to pay the alleged bribes through a series of companies. ghost', according to Anticorruption.