The judge rejects the PSOE's appeal and confirms the filing of the case on the alleged illegal donations to the PP

The magistrate already agreed to the provisional dismissal in December after the Prosecutor's Office requested it

MADRID, 17 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz has rejected the request of the PSOE and the Human Rights Observatory Association (DESC) to reopen the piece known as 'finalist commissions' derived from the Gürtel case in which the alleged donations from businessmen to the PP in exchange for the award of certain public works.

Thus, according to legal sources consulted by Europa Press, the person in charge of the Central Court of Instruction number 5 confirms the file, and therefore the final decision remains in the hands of the Criminal Chamber, since the appellants subsidiarily raised the matter on appeal .

With this resolution, the magistrate reaffirms his order of December 2022 in which he indicated that after five years since the case was reopened, the perpetration of the crimes that gave rise to the formation of the case was not duly justified.

Pedraz's decision also came after the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office requested the dismissal after receiving a last report from the General Intervention of the State Administration (IGAE) where no irregularities were detected in the award processes.

The case, known as the "finalist commissions", was initiated by judge Pablo Ruz in 2013, but he closed it two years later when he saw no criminal evidence other than the payment of the reform of the "popular" headquarters in Genoa with those off-the-books funds. However, what was revealed by the leader of the 'Gürtel', Francisco Correa, during the trial for the first period of the corrupt plot allowed it to be reactivated.

The former treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas, who until then had denied it, confessed in a letter sent to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office that some of the donations made were seeking awards. In his statement on July 16, 2021 before Pedraz, he directly implicated all the PP Ministers of Development and Environment by stating that they dealt with businessmen who contributed to this alleged unofficial accounting.

He recounted a specific episode that his predecessor in the PP Treasury, the late Álvaro Lapuerta, would have transmitted to him in his day. According to Bárcenas, Lapuerta went to the general director of State Highways and the then minister, Francisco Álvarez Cascos, scolded him, indicating that he should always contact him for such matters.

That of the former 'popular' treasurer was the last statement before Pedraz ended the investigation phase on July 29, 2021. Since then, the judge has been waiting to receive the latest report from the IGAE to decide the future of the cause.

It should be remembered that last week the letter from Bárcenas himself, to which Europa Press had access, came to light, in which the former treasurer asked that the National Court reject the PSOE's request to reopen the piece.

In it, he stressed that it was already determined in a March 2015 order "that the donations were not of a final nature" and that after the reopening of the case "none of the multiple investigative procedures carried out has been able to derive any indication on the alleged link between donations and the awarding of public contracts".

In his opinion of Bárcenas' defense, "if the irregular financing of political parties did not constitute a crime before 2015, it would only be possible to commit a possible crime of bribery or influence peddling if it could be proven that the delivery of money it was in exchange for public awards, something that has not been proven".