The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) judges Laura Borràs, suspended president of Parliament and leader of Junts, from this Friday until March 1. She is accused of having divided eighteen contracts when she directed the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, between 2013 and 2017, to allegedly award them to a friend, Isaías Herrero, without having to submit to a public contest. The Prosecutor’s Office asks Borràs and Herrero for a sentence of six years in prison and 21 years of disqualification for document falsification and prevarication and compromises the political career of the leader of Junts that she is pending to know if she can return to preside over Parliament.

Borràs, who has always maintained that he is suffering political persecution comparable to the process opened against the leaders of the procés, will go to court without the support of the rest of the pro-independence parties. Neither the ERC nor the CUP will shelter her at the doors of the courthouse, considering that the cause is unrelated to the process and related to corruption. Proof of this are the differences that other actors of the independence movement also express. Neither the mayors of the Association of Municipalities for Independence nor Òmnium Cultural will support Borràs. Neither will his party’s candidate for mayor of Barcelona, ??Xavier Trías, nor the former president Artur Mas.

In this sense, Borràs has announced this Thursday that he is leaving public life to focus on his defense while his trial lasts.

One of the great unknowns of the trial could be revealed today. The Prosecutor’s Office and the defendant Herrero have negotiated a confession in recent days to frame Borràs in exchange for obtaining a minimum sentence that allows him to avoid jail. The reduction of the sentence by the Prosecutor’s Office could be announced today during the previous questions when the public prosecutor reads the charges that he presents against Herrero. Another possibility is that the Prosecutor’s Office waits for the defendant to confess to the alleged fraud during his statement and at the end of the trial, in the conclusion process, the prosecutor asks to reduce the sentence.

The president of the Parliament always maintains that hers is a prospective investigation and denounces that the Mossos did not see a crime when they investigated her but that when the Civil Guard did, suspicions arose. The truth, however, is that the Mossos did see a crime and they reported it to the judge when they discovered by chance the involvement of the current Junts leader in an alleged case of chopping up contracts. Catalan police were investigating a drug dealer and counterfeiter after finding a package full of counterfeit banknotes at a post office. Behind that was hiding Isaías Herrero, Borràs’s friend, who in a telephone conversation that the Mossos intervened bragged about the “trapis” that he did with the then director of the ILC. Those first indications forced the Catalan police to pull the thread and when reviewing the emails between Borràs and Herrero they noticed the alleged goings-on. The defense of the leader of Junts will be fully used during the trial to challenge the compromising emails.

However, despite the fact that the investigation of Borras was carried out by the Mossos, the publication of a radio news item in which the Catalan police searched the Information Telecommunications Center to collect the emails between Herrero and Borràs angered the judge who expelled the Mossos from the investigation, accusing them of the leak. It was November 2018 and there was a time of mistrust of justice with the Catalan police after the accusation of the highest of the Mossos for alleged inaction in stopping 1-O. Three years later, with less troubled waters, the Catalan police once again took charge of some of the investigation proceedings.

The trial will be led by the president of the TSJC, Jesús María Barrientos, whom Borràs’s defense tried to appeal without success. Barrientos condemned Artur Mas for 9-N and Quim Torra for hanging a banner, but last year he received a severe setback that hit his credibility. First, the special chamber of the TSJC accepted the challenge and removed it before judging the former president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent, and the independentistas of his table, considering that his impartiality could be questioned. And, in addition, the Supreme Court annulled the sentence in which it condemned the independentistas of the Table of Carme Forcadell also for lack of impartiality. Despite Borràs’s attempts to remove Barrientos, the president will lead the hearing together with judges Fernando Lacaba, from the conservative Professional Association of the Magistracy and judge María Jesús Manzano, from the appeals section.