This is one of the last steps before ending the investigation of ‘Pit’
MADRID, 20 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The judge of the National Court (AN) Manuel García Castellón has summoned for this Friday the businessman William Anthony Schwank, claimed by Guatemala as an alleged intermediary of an illegal commission for the expansion of Puerto Quetzal, in order to testify as a witness in the investigation about the request that the brothers Ángel and Álvaro Pérez Maura would have made to commissioner José Manuel Villarejo to prevent the former from being extradited to the Central American nation.
Schwank is summoned at 10:00 a.m. on October 21, according to legal sources consulted by Europa Press. It will be the second time that he appears before the head of the Central Court of Instruction Number 6. He already did so on March 11, but then he accepted his right not to testify when he was immersed in an extradition process to Guatemala.
He is one of the six people, along with Ángel Pérez Maura, against whom the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office issued international arrest warrants in 2016 for their alleged involvement in paying bribes for the Quetzal Container Terminal (TQC) to obtain the expansion contract of said port. In his case, he saw alleged crimes of illicit association, passive bribery and fraud.
In February, he was taken to court at the National High Court, agreeing to his unconditional provisional detention within the framework of the extradition process. The anti-corruption prosecutors Miguel Serrano and Jorge Andújar were aware of this and asked to question him as a witness, considering that he could help clarify a possible crime against the public administration committed by those investigated in ‘Pit’.
The reason for calling Schwank López, according to the anti-corruption prosecutors in their brief -which this news agency was able to see-, are thirteen recorded conversations and, specifically, an audio of more than 40 minutes between a subject identified as Schwank López and another “initially unknown”.
In 2019, the instructor commissioned the Internal Affairs Unit (UAI) to analyze this conversation and another in which Villarejo’s partner, Rafael Redondo, intervened “undoubtedly”; the former police officer and collaborator of the companies of Commissioner Antonio Bonilla; and a third identified as Antonio Serrano.
The intention was to determine if the unknown interlocutor in the Schwank López audio was Bonilla. The UAI concluded that it was not possible to carry out a complete analysis due to the lack of the “spectrographic acoustic study” but that, judging by the “auditory perception”, it did not rule out that “the analyzed speeches could have been made by the same person”.
Schwank’s statement is one of the last loose ends to be tied up before García Castellón puts an end to the investigation of this separate piece number 4 of ‘Tándem’, according to the aforementioned sources.
The starting point of this separate piece –called ‘Pit’– is situated in 2016, when Guatemala asked Spain to hand over Pérez Maura, accused of paying bribes of up to 30 million dollars to senior officials of that country, including former president Otto Pérez Molina and his vice president Roxana Baldetti, to obtain the award of an infrastructure in Puerto Quetzal.
According to the judicial account, the Pérez Maura would then have gone to Villarejo to stop the extradition of Ángel. For this commission, baptized as ‘Pit’ -hence the name of the separate piece-, the business group of the then commissioner would have pocketed 7.4 million euros.
Initially, the Spanish investigation focused on ‘Pit’, but when the National High Court rejected Pérez Maura’s extradition to Guatemala in 2018 for being a Spanish citizen, it opened the door for him to be tried in Spain for the crimes he was accused of there. .
In response, García Castellón assumed in April 2021 the case directed in Guatemala against Pérez Maura for alleged crimes of illicit association, fraud and bribery to conclude the investigation phase and, where appropriate, proceed to trial.
Since then, he has requested various information from the Guatemalan Prosecutor’s Office. Last March, almost a year after submitting the first rogatory commission, he received the requested documentation by diplomatic bag.
However, García Castellón is still waiting for the Guatemalan Public Ministry to answer whether or not it will allow him to travel there to complete the pending investigations on the Guatemalan side of the case on the ground.
The aforementioned sources explain that the silence of the Guatemalan authorities on the possibility that García Castellón would personally transfer is currently the main obstacle to putting an end to the investigation of ‘Pit’.
From the National High Court several reminders have already been issued to Guatemala to try to obtain a response –in any sense–, although without success. The same sources assure that an ultimatum will be sent to try to settle the matter.
