The Court of Accounts refuses to lower the sentence of the leaders of 9-N

They asked to go from more than a million interests to just over 590,000 euros

The Court of Auditors (TCu) has dismissed this Monday the appeal filed by the former Catalan counselor Francesc Homs, and to which former president Artur Mas joined, among others, with which they intended to make a different computation of the liquidation of interest for the sentence they received because of the independence referendum on November 9, 2014.

As reported by legal sources to Europa Press, the Court of Justice of the TCu has rejected the Homs appeal, thus confirming the order of July 28 with which the Prosecution Section already dismissed the challenges to the liquidation of interests practiced.

It should be remembered that the Court of Accounts sentenced Mas and nine former members of his Government for organizing the 9-N referendum to return 4.9 million euros, to which were added more than one million euros for accrued interest .

Homs, whose allegations were joined by Mas, Irene Rigau, Joana Ortega, Josefina Valls and Jordi Vilajoana, wanted the interest to be set at 590,547.63 euros.

The former counselor explained in his appeal, to which Europa Press has had access, that the controversy is due to whether the appropriations made "paralyzed or extinguished the accrual of interest."

Homs recalled in his challenge that the Trial Chamber established that "the extinction of the interest payment obligation only occurs if the principal has been delivered or has been made available to the affected public entity, denying any release effect in this sense to the appropriations made considering that no payment was made by the parties to the Generalitat de Catalunya for this concept" until July 30, 2020.

However, the former counselor argued that the computation of interest should have been paralyzed from the moment the successive appropriations were made.

In this sense, it highlighted that "from the moment the consignment is made, the destination of the consigned capital will no longer depend on the defendant, since from the time it is entered into the judicial account, no power will be held with respect to the former, remaining at the expense of the result of the judicial proceedings".

"This being the case, it should be noted that neither the entity allegedly harmed nor any of the accusations requested the payment of the consigned amounts, even having knowledge of their payment, nor did they request any execution throughout the procedure," it stressed.

THE PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE WAS OPPOSED

The Prosecutor's Office, in a report to which Europa Press has also had access, opposed the Homs appeal, considering that "it does nothing but reiterate the arguments that have been dismissed by the contested order, without providing new arguments, showing its disagreement when linking the release effect of the consignment to the acceptance and payment of the sentence imposed"

Prosecutor Manuel Martín-Granizo recalled that the appealed decision "what it does is conclude that in the present case the consignment carried out has not produced a release effect because the consignee has not expressed his willingness to accept and pay the sentence imposed ".

"The appellants had legal advice that should have allowed them to adequately assess the conditions and requirements of the way to make the consignment to achieve the intended effects," it pointed out.