The Police inspector who investigated the Gürtel case has explained that the plot moved to the Valencian Community due to the “good relationship” that the businessman Álvaro Pérez, El Bigotes, had with the former president of the Generalitat Francisco Camps, and because they considered that they would obtain business both in the PP and in the Generalitat.
The court of the National Court that is trying Camps and more than twenty other defendants for allegedly irregular awards to the Gürtel network in the Valencian Community has heard this Wednesday the testimony of the inspector who directed the investigations into the case in the Economic and Criminal Crime Unit. Prosecutor (UDEF), Manuel Morocho, and two companions.
The three have been ratifying, one by one, the reports that have laid the foundations for the accusation of this branch of the Gürtel case, and Morocho has supported the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office: in 2004 the plot was deployed in the Comunitat Valenciana by chance. relationship that El Bigotes established with Camps, something that the former subscribes to and the latter flatly denies.
Morocho has explained that, “thanks” to that “good relationship”, this “tilt” of the “Correa structure to Valencia” occurred at a time when it “stopped having that weight at a central level”; and that those considered to be the ringleaders of the plot believed that this “was going to open the doors for the two main activities” of the network: obtaining campaign events for the PP and obtaining contracts with the Valencian administration.
But the “paradigm” was the same as that followed in the Community of Madrid: they sought to organize electoral campaigns and “in this way achieve favorability of public procurement.”
Morocho has spoken of a relationship of “proximity” and “familiarity” between Camps and El Bigotes, as shown in the telephone conversations analyzed, in which the former president and his wife show “gratitude” to the businessman “for everything he is doing for the family,” he said.
According to the inspector, it can be considered that Álvaro Pérez “works for the president” and not so much for the Valencian PP, and he has also mentioned the gifts he gave to Camps, his wife, the former Valencian vice president Vicente Rambla and his wife, in those who, according to conversations, put “a lot of himself” and implied that they were “ad hoc” compensation to be recognized.
He also gave – the police testimony has continued – gifts to former senior officials such as the former secretary general of the Valencian PP Ricardo Costa; former deputy secretary of organization David Serra; or the former Valencian vice president Víctor Campos, names that also appear among the call lists of El Bigotes those years in which the Gürtel plot worked in the Valencian Community.
As in the other macro-case trials in which he has testified, the inspector has recounted the “modus operandi” of the network, which presented a “coordinated and unitary action” regardless of the administration for which he worked and which had as ” ultimate goal” economic “enrichment.”
To do this, contracts were divided, invoices were divided into pieces with other companies in the group or outside, and internal compensations were generated “so that the money received from the Generalitat” or from some Department went “to the company’s coffers” that they wanted.
The Prosecutor’s Office requests two and a half years in prison and 10 years of disqualification for Camps considering that there are indications that he allegedly gave instructions to contract with Gürtel to set up an exhibitor at the 2009 Fitur fair.
In addition to him, three of his former ministers (Alicia de Miguel, Manuel Cervera and Luis Rosado) and other former senior officials such as David Serra are accused.
