The statement by the official who was in charge of the administration of the Institució de les Letres Catalanes (ILC) has meant a new setback for Laura Borràs. In a statement as a witness, the official recalled that after Borràs’ first year as director of the ILC, she conveyed her concern to him after detecting that minor contracts were being split up to award them to Isaías Herrero, a friend of the director. “Yes, I had a concern,” she said. “The contracts were repetitive, they seemed divided and I told him to see if it could be done in a different way. At first glance we already saw that this could be infringing the legal framework because it seemed that it was divided ”, she explained. However, Borràs ignored her and she asked to continue making the contracts because “they were different jobs”, the official recalled.
“It was clear that all the work was done by Isaías because we were awarding contracts to companies to carry out some tasks, but in the end the work always ended up being done by Isaías Herrero. That surprised me a lot, but not only me, all the ILC staff”, he recounted before the court. According to the prosecution, Herrero, with the approval of Borràs, prepared invoices and contracting estimates in the name of billing cooperatives, which did not do any work, to mask that he was always the beneficiary. The official has expressed the suspicions generated by the hiring of Herrero.
On the one hand, he explained that it was Herrero himself who sent him the three budgets, both his own and that of the other two companies that also applied for the award, and that on paper they should not be related to him. “I said I didn’t want to receive any more mail. I didn’t like that system. If budgets were requested, it was the companies who had to send them and not that the same person (Herrero) sent them to me. I didn’t like that and I asked that they send it to the director and I asked that she then give it to me on paper”. The official was also surprised that shortly after arriving at the ILC, Borràs personally introduced Herrero to the organization’s workers as the person who would be in charge of maintaining the web portal. “I thought that this should be done by the department’s computer scientists.”
The official proposed that instead of making several minor contracts, a negotiated contract should be made so as not to violate the legislation in force at that time. She even went so far as to call a meeting with the head of recruitment of the department of culture, to whom the ILC depended, to propose the new contracting formula, but she was met with refusal from Borràs. “The director said no, to continue doing as it was done.” “I didn’t like these irregularities that were being done in the ILC and I didn’t want them to be perpetuated. That is why I wanted to make a negotiated contract ”, she has justified.
In addition, the official, to stay out of irregularities, asked Herrero not to send the three budgets to her but to send them directly to Borràs and that she be the one to deliver them later. She even went so far as to ask them not to forward the emails they exchanged from her private accounts and to use the official email of the Generalitat. “I didn’t like what was happening,” she confessed.
Borràs’s lawyer, Isabel Elbal, has tried to counter the harsh testimony of the official by assuring that she was giving many more details in today’s session than when she testified before the Civil Guard. “She is changing the statement,” the lawyer denounced. The official, with visible indignation at the attacks by Borràs’ lawyers, has assured that “her obligation to her was to comply with the regulations and that the three budgets were explicit instructions from the Department of Culture. I was obliged to comply with them, as well as all the members of the Department of Culture ”, she replied. “If I did not speak more, it was because at that time it was because” I did not want to add fuel to the fire “, the official has settled.
