The National Court sets for June 24, 2024 the start of the trial of the Arganda piece of the Gurtel case

MADRID, 27 Ene. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Criminal Chamber of the National Court has set a date, June 24, 2024, for the beginning of the oral trial for the separate piece of 'Gurtel' referring to the irregular adjudications of the plot in the Madrid town of Arganda del Rey . The sessions are expected to last until October 3, as reported this Friday by the Arganda del Rey City Council, a person in the case.

It was in September 2019 when the then magistrate of the National Court José de la Mata sent 21 investigated for these adjudications in the municipality between 1998 and 2009 to trial. The judge then imposed bonds of up to 80 million euros for some of them for the amount of the fines they will face if convicted.

Specifically, in the order issued by De la Mata, he imposed 78 million euros of bail for the leader of Gürtel, Francisco Correa and his right-hand man, Pablo Crespo, and 79.1 million for the construction businessman Fernando Martín, for the activities deployed in almost a decade to illicitly enrich themselves by manipulating public contracts and charged to the funds of the municipal entities of the Madrid town.

The former mayor of Arganda Ginés López, the former deputy mayor and deputy in the Madrid Assembly Benjamín Martín Vasco and his brother Joaquín, the former Madrid deputy María Josefa Aguado, as well as employees of public companies in this town will also sit on the bench. Juan Fernández Caballero (Promotion and Development Society), César Tomás Martín Morales (Land) and Álvaro García del Río, Isaac García Requena and José Ramón Gutiérrez Villar (Development).

On behalf of the Gurtel companies, the accountant of the plot, José Luis Izquierdo; as well as the administrator of Grupo Correa Isabel Jordán, the "financial brain" Ramón Blanco Balín -whom the judge imposes a 75 million euro bail- and Pablo Collado Serra, former manager of the Fundación Baleares Sostenible and employee of one of the Correa companies, Easy Concept.

Businessmen Luis Bremond, José Luis Martínez Parra, Manuel Salinas and Amando Mayo will also be tried, the latter two with bonds of 75 and 80 million, respectively; the former manager of Constructora Hispánica Alfonso García Pozuelo and the mercantile companies Special Events, Easy Concept, Good

In this separate piece, a complex corporate framework has been investigated aimed at obtaining public contract awards irregularly in exchange for or on the occasion of the delivery to officials and authorities with competence in the field of public procurement, valuable gifts or important amounts of money.

The courts will be for crimes of prevarication, continued crime of fraud against public administrations, continued passive bribery, continued falsification of a commercial document, continued active bribery, against the public Treasury, punishable insolvency and embezzlement of public funds.

As De la Mata explained in the order to open the oral trial, those investigated agreed to defraud the public entities of Arganda del Rey and specifically the municipality itself and the Sociedad de Fomento, for which they intervened in the succession of acts of planning and subsequent execution of the "predatory activity" that they all carried out together.

In the case of the former mayor, along with Martín Vasco and Fernández Caballero, all three in a privileged position in the public administration in Arganda and very relevant powers in the contracting area, the judge pointed out that this allowed the network to ensure that the contracts "they will be awarded according to the gang's designs", causing "enormous damage to the public entity".

Meanwhile, the rest of the investigated who held positions in the municipal companies of Arganda collaborated by providing technical or valuation reports, giving the go-ahead to procedures and invoices and payments that benefited the entire plot.

Correa's people, for their part, "actively corrupted" public officials with their promises and gifts, always according to the judge, "until they compromised them as members of the criminal community" in such a way that they reached a "permanent and systematic" agreement. for the embezzlement of the city council and its public companies.

Finally, the businessmen contributed to ensure that the public contracts were awarded to them, for which they submitted the already rigged offers, knowing that they would be the winners, with exorbitant prices, impossible compliance terms or with prior knowledge of the conditions of the specifications. , and with "million-dollar commissions" involved.

The mayor of Arganda, Guillermo Hita, has affirmed that the consistory is satisfied that there is already a date because its objective "is that all the people involved and who allegedly committed the crimes specified in the summary return all the amounts of the looting that was made in the locality".

"As of June 2024, the people of Arganda will know the depth to which the looting of the municipal coffers by all those who were involved in the Gürtel plot reached," Hita indicated.