The pact between the Government and ERC to reform the Penal Code bears fruit. The State Attorney’s Office, which reports to the Ministry of Justice, asks to punish with lower sentences those considered architects of the process, Josep María Jové and Lluís Salvadó, both ERC deputies. As La Vanguardia has learned, for Jové he is asking for a sentence of 3 and a half years in prison and 7 years of disqualification for the crimes of disobedience and attenuated embezzlement, the criminal offense reformed thanks to an agreement between the Government and ERC. In his case, he considers that there was no profit motive and therefore requests to apply the attenuated type of crime. In the case of Salvadó, current president of the port of Barcelona and former Secretary of the Treasury during the Puigdemont government, the Lawyers ask to exonerate him and do not file charges against him. His name does not appear in the letter.
The State Attorney’s Office has already opted to apply attenuated embezzlement to the leaders of the process in the review of the sentence made by the Supreme Court after the abolition of the crime of sedition and the reform of embezzlement. In that case, she indicated that no public funds were stolen for their own profit or for a third party. This position marks the path that the Ministry of Justice will follow in the procedure for the preparations for the referendum that is being followed in the trial court 13 of Barcelona and where some thirty high-ranking government officials are accused.
The prosecution, on the other hand, claims seven and a half years in prison for Jové and six for Salvadó, considering that they had “direct participation in the illegal commitment of public funds”. The State Attorney General’s Office approved a decree after the entry into force of the new reform that established as a criterion to apply aggravated embezzlement in all cases in which “the person responsible acts with conscience and willingness to dispose of public assets as if it were their own, using it for purposes unrelated to the public function to obtain an advantage or benefit own or someone else’s of any kind.” For the Minister of Culture, Natàlia Garriga, who is also being investigated in this procedure, the State Attorney’s Office is demanding a year in prison for disobedience, the same penalty that the Prosecutor’s Office is requesting for her.
Jové and Salvadó were prosecuted by the Supreme Court of Justice of Catalonia on the understanding that they played a key role in organizing the referendum on October 1 and preparing the state structures of the future Catalan state. A Civil Guard report included in the case indicated that the ERC deputies had drawn up 152 draft bills and decrees that had to be approved as of October 2 and that they provided for the implementation of their own treasury, an agency of social protection, a new judiciary and the takeover of telecommunications and basic infrastructure.
