“What I do have evidence from Mr. Álvaro Pérez himself is that he worked with the party and with the Valencian government because the president had decided so.” He said it this morning in the trial that was being followed at the National Court by Ricardo Costa, who was number two for Francisco Camps in the match between 2007 and 2009. A statement in which he has stressed on several occasions that Camps and other members of the Valencian executive met with El Bigotes “and there were cross talks about acts to be carried out in the game and events of the Generalitat Valenciana such as the Volvo Ocean Race or the Open of Tennis of Valencia”. However, in a direct question from Judge José Antonio Mora about whether he was aware as a witness that Camps gave the instructions for the contracts under trial, Costa said that “not directly.”
The oral hearing is held to judge the last piece of the Gürtel case on the alleged participation of the former president, and 26 other defendants, in an operation to facilitate contracts with the Orange Market company, skipping all legal criteria, including those of the stand de Fitur of 2009. This firm, a Valencian subsidiary of the Francisco Correa group, benefited from the alleged favor of Francisco Camps to carry out minor contracts during the years 2004 and 2009 worth several hundred thousand euros. The prosecutor asks in his accusation for Camps two years and six months in prison, and disqualification from public office for ten years. He is accused of the crimes of prevarication and fraud against the public administration.
Ricardo Costa was sentenced in 2018 to four years in prison for Gürtel’s piece referring to the illegal financing of the party in the 2007 and 2008 campaigns, although he has not been sent to prison after agreeing with the prosecutor’s office to carry out social work. His statements were the key to the imputation and prosecution of the former Valencian president. In this regard, Costa has come to affirm today that Francisco Camps admitted and motivated the debt accumulated by the Valencian PP with the company that managed El Bigotes in Valencia to be covered with the money contributed by companies “through direct deliveries or false invoices “.
Ricardo Costa has once again defended the “personal friendship” between El Bigotes and Camps, an extreme that the former president has always denied and that they came to eat with their family at the Valencia Tennis Club. He has gone so far as to say that he ate “sandwiches” with Camps and Pérez in the Generalitat Valenciana and that it was El Bigotes who introduced him to the ex-president’s wife, Isabel Bas, who ran a pharmacy in Valencia. And he has insisted that the head of Orange Market had access to the president, the Valencian vice presidents and several ministers.
On the question that it was Francisco Camps who gave the direct order for the Fitur stand to be contracted with Orange Market, Ricardo Costa has always defended that he knew it was because of the facts and because of what El Bigotes told him that “there was to contract with Orange Market”.
(((There will be expansion)))
