Extends the initial term, of one week, so that the technicians of the General Intervention of the State send the dossier that they commissioned
MADRID, 5 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The judge of the National High Court, Santiago Pedraz, has extended by three weeks the initial period of seven days that he gave to the General Intervention of the State Administration (IGAE) to send him the report that they must prepare on the alleged irregular awards to alleged donors of the ‘box b’ of the Popular Party.
Legal sources have informed Europa Press that the head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 5 has finally set the deadline at one month. The magistrate gave the technicians a week last Friday to send the document “given the time that has elapsed since the presentation was commissioned and reiterated” of the same.
That requirement came after the instructor ordered on September 12 to send a “reminder letter” to the IGAE, “given the time that has elapsed” since he entrusted said ‘dossier’. The sources consulted by this agency explained that the IGAE did not respond to that first message, which led Pedraz to set the deadline that he has now extended.
This report is the last pending document of the many commissioned by the instructor on the process of awarding the investigated public contracts.
In those sent so far, the IGAE has been reflecting irregularities. Thus, in one dated December 16, 2021, it highlighted “very notable deviations” in a contract awarded in 2003 by the Ministry of the Environment to Constructora Hispánica SA, a company investigated in the ‘Gürtel’ plot.
In this latest report, the IGAE is expected to make a global analysis of all the contracts awarded to companies that would have nourished the ‘box b’ with their donations in exchange for receiving public contracts.
Once sent, it will be the turn of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. After that, Pedraz, already with all the information on the table, must decide if there is sufficient evidence to prosecute those investigated for this cause, whose investigations ended on July 29, 2021.
The case, known as that of the ‘finalist commissions’, was initiated by Judge Pablo Ruz in 2013, but he closed it two years later when he saw no more criminal evidence than that of the payment of the reform of the ‘popular’ headquarters of 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.
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 of July 16, 2021 before Pedraz, the former treasurer directly implicated all the Ministers of Public Works and the Environment of the PP by stating that they were dealing with the businessmen who contributed to that alleged informal accounting.
Specifically, he recounted an 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 go to him for these matters.
