A court in Barcelona is investigating another complaint by a real estate agency against the mayoress, Ada Colau, for allegedly pressuring her with sanctions to avoid the eviction of a tenant considered vulnerable, in what is her fourth criminal case opened before the municipal elections.
As Eldiario.es has advanced, the head of the Investigating Court number 20 of Barcelona has admitted the complaint, which accuses the mayoress of the Catalan capital of the crimes of coercion and prevarication.
The complaint, which according to municipal sources is signed by the same lawyer who filed the Vauras real estate company – a case also under investigation – is also directed against the Councilor for Housing, Lucia MartÃn, and against SIPHO workers, a municipal service designed to prevent eviction of vulnerable people, as well as the Disciplinary Unit and the District of Grà cia.
The real estate agency Juninmo accuses the mayoress of an eviction case that occurred in 2021, when the SIPHO mediation service intervened to prevent the eviction of a resident of Les Corts who the municipal social services considered vulnerable and who ultimately was not carried out. carried out thanks to the agreement between the tenant and the company that owns the property.
During the process, the City Council filed a file with the real estate company for not offering the tenant social rent -based on an article of the Catalan housing law that provided for it before the Constitutional Court annulled it-, which ended up being archived.
At the same real estate agency, the Urban Ecology Licensing Directorate filed another sanctioning file for an illegal tourist apartment, in which, the consistory highlights, neither the Les Corts Housing Office nor the SIPHO had any intervention. That file was also archived, after the allegations presented by the property, as provided for in the regulations that regulate the administrative procedure, add the same sources.
As in the case of the complaint filed by the Vauras investment fund, the real estate company accuses the City Council of having used these sanctioning files as a pressure mechanism to coerce it in such a way that it ended up stopping the eviction. Company sources have expressed their “perplexity” over the leaking of the procedure and their confidence that the judge will continue with the investigation since it is a case devoid of any political motivation in which the owners “go to court to defend fundamental rights that have been violated”.
The circumstance arises that the court of first instance that processed the eviction that did not take place rejected that the condition of vulnerability appreciated by the municipal social services was sufficient reason to suspend it. The SEPE report that the tenant stopped receiving unemployment in 2016 considering it “old” and because the man stated that his family could help him “to cover basic expenses” was considered insufficient to ratify the situation of economic precariousness.
Sources from the City Council have defended that this lawsuit represents a new case of legal war against the mayoress and have claimed that the SIPHO constitutes a “good practice” in the field of public housing policies that has been recognized by the United Nations and by the NGO World Habitat .
For the moment, the investigating court has requested the eviction file from the first instance that ordered it and has also requested the disciplinary process.
With this complaint, Colau adds her fourth open criminal case with just over a month to go before the municipal elections: three other courts are investigating her for the Eixample superblock project, for alleged pressure on the Vauras investment fund to force it to cede social rent and for municipal subsidies to related entities.
