The best defense is a good attack, Laura Borràs must have thought when she shot yesterday against all those who have incriminated her in the trial for the alleged splitting of contracts at the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (ILC). The Junts leader defended the legality of the contracts that are now under suspicion and unloaded on a subordinate the responsibility of possible irregularities. Nobody warned her of any malpractice and when some slight irregularities appeared, the Intervention of the Department of Culture validated them, she wielded yesterday.
The statement lasted an hour and a half and Borràs, who in the last two weeks has seen her cornered by emails in which she discussed with her friend Isaías Herrero how to falsify contracts, and the confession of the two defendants after agreeing with the Prosecutor’s Office , yesterday claimed the legality of the entire contracting process and showed pride in his work at the head of the organization. “Everything was correct, legal and perfectly reasonable by the criteria set by the administration,” he said. “Not in the remotest of my nightmares did I think it could be investigated. The only reason why certain actions of a judicial nature take place is because of my political ties. It’s lawfare and political persecution.”
For the first time since 2019, the year the case broke out, Borràs explained the minor contract he used to sign his friend. He did it only by answering to his lawyer, Isabel Elbal, and dumping her responsibility on the head of administration who never warned her to do anything illegal. There were 18 minor contracts between 2013 and 2017 worth 335,000 euros that were awarded to his friend Isaías Herrero. The Prosecutor’s Office considers that it was actually a single contract divided into several so as not to exceed the threshold of 18,000 euros established by law for minor contracts and avoid calling a public tender. Borràs argued that the common link was the ILC web portal, which was a “window of Catalan literature to the world” but that each commission was “a different project”.
Borràs’s harshest criticism was directed at Assumpta P, the ILC’s head of administration, who last week revealed in court that the then-director ignored her warnings that contracts were being broken up and in violation of the law. The Junts leader blamed the official for devising the way in which Herrero was hired and for having validated all the files that passed through her hands without raising the alarm. “Ms. Assumpta P. is very professional, she worked with great precision and personally prepared the contracting files and ensured their compliance. If she hadn’t wanted to do it, she wouldn’t have done it,” she stated.
The administrator’s statement was a severe blow to the defense of the Junts leader and that is why yesterday she charged the inks against the official. “I understand that being subjected to a judicial process is an uncomfortable matter and that everyone responds as best they can and, therefore, I understand that [Assumpta P.] wants to take the responsibility off her shoulders.”
Nor did the reports analyzing the agency’s accounts warn of any malpractice, he alleged. In 2014, a report from the Intervention warned of minor irregularities, Borràs presented allegations and the inspector accepted them. “It could have been the case that she had not accepted them, but she accepted them,” she justified herself.
In parallel, the Junts leader defended the decision to hire Isaías Herrero, a computer scientist she met at a digital literature award. Borràs explained, in an attempt to compromise the main prosecution witness in the case, that Herrero “confessed” to him that he had “drug addiction” problems and that he was treating himself with MTD, an acronym that the leader understands as an abbreviation for methadone. Furthermore, she claimed that he had previously spoken to her about mental health issues. In this sense, she stressed that in these situations she showed her support. “I always believed him and tried to support him, now I see that he was lying to me.” “It has hurt me to see the level of degradation in which he has presented himself in this trial. I was not a mere computer scientist, he was a digital artist ”.
In the morning, the experts hired by Borràs, including the far-right Luis Enrique Hellín (formerly Emilio Hellín), denounced that the hard drives seized by the Mossos where the incriminating emails from the Junts leader were found had been altered. They did not say that the emails were not written by Borràs, but rather that the fingerprint of the original file and the copy did not match.
