The Supreme Court has ruled on the Sijena case and has declared that the amounts of money that Santi Vila and his successor as Minister of Culture, Lluís Puig, were demanded in court as bail were enormous and seriously violated the presumption of innocence.
Vila and Puig held office during the litigation over the 97 art objects, whose return was demanded by the Sijena monastery. The MNAC handed over those that it voluntarily guarded, while the Museu de Lleida, in agreement with the Generalitat, refused to do so with those it owned, considering that they were protected assets.
It was the civil guard itself, as judicial police, that executed the order in December 2017. The head of the Investigating Court number 3 of Huesca ordered the opening of an oral trial against Vila and Puig for not having delivered the 44 works to Aragon of art from Sijena that were in the Museu de Lleida despite the court order. That was the reason why the former ministers were prosecuted for alleged disobedience and had to deliver large sums of money as bail.
In February 2021, Santi Vila came to hand over the deeds to an apartment he owned in Figueres as guarantee for the 216,000-euro bond that the magistrate of the Investigating Court number 3 of Huesca was demanding. He deposited 108,000 euros in cash, provided by friends and collaborators of his, and covered the rest with the value of his apartment. The bail for Minister Puig amounted, for his part, to 88,000 euros.
The bond responded to an order issued on December 5, 2019 to guarantee and ensure the possible responsibilities that could be imposed as a result of the lawsuit filed by the Villanueva de Sijena city council for an alleged crime of disobedience to the court order to return 44 pieces of the monastery of Sijena that were in the museum of Lleida and for the crime of usurpation of judicial powers.
Santi Vila already considered the amount of the bail “nonsense” since the Prosecutor’s Office had only requested a fine of 5,940 euros (eleven months of fine at a rate of 18 euros per day) for disobedience. And the government of Aragon did not even appear in the cause. Instead, the Sijena city council requested 11 months in prison, a fine of 162,000 euros and disqualification for two years.
Former Minister Vila pointed out this Wednesday on social networks that the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, has formally informed him that he wants to accompany him in his defense in the trial that will have to be held soon. “I can only have words of gratitude towards a decision that honors the Government and that comforts me”, he said.
At the time, the Caixa de la Solidaritat, which collected donations to meet the bonds requested by the courts from Catalan politicians linked to the process, refused to take charge of the claim from the Huesca court requested from the former minister Vila, despite the fact that Yes, he would have paid Puig’s bail.
