Francisco Grau, whom the public prosecution considers the financial “mastermind” of the alleged corrupt plot of the Erial case, for which the former president of the Generalitat and former minister Eduardo Zaplana is also being tried, has tried today to refute the statement made yesterday by Joaquín Barceló , “Pachano”, and has assured that Barceló himself told him that they “forced him to confess.”
In the fourth session of the Erial case trial, due to the alleged “bites” in the awards of the Valencian ITV and wind farms, Grau has denied that he handed over five million euros in cash to Barceló to take them to Andorra, as he explained yesterday the confessed figurehead. To Grau, who is a lawyer, tax advisor and was a professor of Economics at the University of Alicante, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office attributes a key role in the company plot designed to hide the trail of money obtained in alleged illicit commissions.
Like Barceló and Zaplana, Grau spent almost nine months in preventive detention and the prosecutor is asking for an 8-year prison sentence for belonging to a criminal group and money laundering.
Regarding the statements of Barceló, who admitted to having been Zaplana’s front man and attributed to him a good part of the decision-making that the Prosecutor’s Office considers illegal, Grau has tried to show them as the result of pressure from the prosecution and the desire to avoid jail. : “Barceló and I spent a few months in the same cell, we know what they suffer,” he said. And he added: “yesterday, when he finished the statement, Barceló told me that they had forced him to do it.”
Regarding the Imilson company, which according to investigators was established in Luxembourg by several members of the Cotino family to pay the bribe for the awarding of the ITVs, Grau has assured that Barceló told him that “there were some gentlemen who wanted to invest in Spain through of a Luxembourg company, they gave me the telephone number of the financial director of Sedesa, who enlightened me on the origin of those funds.
“This man (sedesa director) gave me Beatriz García Paesa’s phone number and I contacted her,” he added. Grau has admitted that one of the days that he met with the niece of the spy Francisco Paesa he also met with Zaplana in Madrid, but he has stressed that it was something coincidental, because he took advantage of the trip to see several clients.
The interrogation of Grau has been long and at times confusing as a result of the numerous documentation shown and the convoluted responses of the accused, whose dialectical exchanges with the Prosecutor have forced the magistrate to intervene in search of clarifications.
In general terms, Grau has denied the accusations, such as that of having delivered a bag with five million euros in cash to Barceló to deposit them in Andorra, while the prosecutor has highlighted the gaps and contradictions that he saw in his answers. The trial will continue next Tuesday.