The former Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre will finally not sit on the bench for irregular financing of the Madrid PP after the judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón has filed the case for her, in addition to refusing to investigate the PP for these facts . Who is accused of these events is who was his number three, Francisco Granados, in addition to the former manager of the Madrid PP Beltrán Gutiérrez and six other people for irregular financing in the 2011 regional elections and online positioning contracts for high-ranking officials.
In a car, the magistrate finalizes the instruction of piece 9 of the so-called Punica case and files the case for 71 natural persons and 3 legal entities. In addition to Aguirre, her successor, Ignacio González, and former directors Manuel Lamela, Lucía Figar, Salvador Victoria and Juan José Güemes, as well as businessmen Juan Miguel Villar Mir and Javier López Madrid, have been left out.
The facts reported in the order to go to abbreviated procedure are typified as crimes of administrative prevarication, embezzlement of public funds, contracting fraud, forgery, bribery, electoral crime and influence peddling.
According to what was investigated, the judge indicates that Esperanza Aguirre’s participation in the criminal acts cannot be considered accredited. In her opinion, “there has been no evidence to confirm that she herself was aware of them.”
In relation to the reputation work carried out by the companies of the also accused Alejandro de Pedro, he affirms that “it has not been possible to prove that it had knowledge, neither of the contracting of the works, nor of its development, nor of how it was carried out. they paid the same”. The rest of the defendants are Diego Mora, Francisco Lobo, Isabel Gallego and José Martínez Nicolás, in addition to the legal entities EICO Reputation Management and Madiva Editorial y Publicidad.
In this procedure, which began in 2014 as a result of a letter rogatory from Switzerland for a possible crime of money laundering in which Granados was being investigated and for which he ended up in prison, the financing of the PP of Madrid in the autonomous electoral campaigns of 2007 and 2011 and the general ones of 2008, although these have been prescribed. In addition, the magistrate has analyzed all the awards in the field of public procurement, as well as online reputation contracts to position senior PP officials in social networks.
In relation to the regional elections of 2011 with Aguirre as a candidate, the only ones not prescribed, the magistrate explains the operation carried out by the PP campaign committee to hide the real expenses of the campaign. Thus, while the electoral account registered costs of 2,986,624 euros that were declared before the Chamber of Accounts, the total costs that the municipal and regional elections entailed for the Madrid PP amounted to 6,878,275.04 euros, including the pre-campaign .
According to the judge, the accounts presented to the Chamber of Accounts “did not respond to the reality of what happened.” The judge adds that “in order to execute such a plan, it was necessary to have related businessmen who, performing the service, later invoiced it under other concepts.”
For this, it was necessary, according to the judge, on the one hand, to use sources of fundraising, “either opaque, or altering the declared destination and, on the other, to transfer those resources to the service providers, either in cash, well through the altered bills.”
Throughout 257 pages, García Castellón explains that the main irregular source of fundraising was through contributions of cash that were delivered, directly or indirectly, to Granados, then regional secretary of the PP.
Once delivered, he continues, he recorded the payments in a handwritten form in a black notebook, after which, he deducted from the amounts an amount that he withheld for himself or for third parties outside the party and, the rest, he sent to the manager. of the regional PP that was in charge of making the cash payments that they did not wish to record before the Chamber of Accounts.
According to the order, the relationship between Granados and Beltrán Gutiérrez was one of full trust, since he himself had been carrying out this work with the different general secretaries of the regional political formation and the different directors of the campaigns as a link between the people who they “received” the money in cash from third parties and, later, they sent it to the regional headquarters.
As another source of financing, indicates the order, that derived from the account of the FUNDESCAM Foundation was added and, already in a transparent way, that derived from the electoral account itself.
