The mayoress Ada Colau has returned to testify as being investigated before the court, this time denounced by an investment fund that accuses her of pressuring them to allocate part of their home to social rental. The Vauras fund sued the mayoress for a crime of coercion and prevarication, accusing the City Council of forcing them to allocate real estate owned by them to social rent under the threat of not granting building permits. Colau has denied before the judge that she gave instructions to the legal services of the consistory to process the files against Vauras. And she has clarified that the sanctions that were filed were proposed by the Institut Municipal d’Habitatge in which she did not intervene. According to legal sources, the judge herself has told Colau that her signature did not appear on any of the documents in the case.
In a statement at the City Hall after declaring, the mayoress has been confident that the investigation will end up archived. “There is no cause. We have eleven complaints filed. It draws quite a bit of attention. They are large economic operators who were not accustomed to having a council that would stop their feet ”, Colau denounced. “There is a vulture fund that, since it does not get what it wants, tries to intimidate a city council based on complaints. We are more convinced than ever that as a council we must enforce the law”.
The examining magistrate 18 of Barcelona, ??who took a statement from him, filed the complaint against Colau in November 2020. The prosecution itself also opposed its acceptance. Neither the judge nor the prosecutor’s office appreciated that the actions of municipal officials constituted a crime. However, the decision was appealed by the fund before the Barcelona Court, which ordered the reopening of the investigation and summons the mayoress and two councilors to testify on this matter. The court considered that “it would be reprehensible if, in order to obtain these home assignments, pressure is placed on the property holders by paralyzing their building permits and by causing them damages if they do not agree to this claim.”
The City Council sanctioned the investment fund after the eviction of the Bloc Llavors, a building in Poblesec where six families lived who could not pay the rent. After the eviction, the councilor for housing, Lucía Martín, announced that the property would be fined for evicting families without offering a social rent and ended up sanctioning the fund with 417,000 euros for breaching the Catalan housing law. However, the Constitutional Court annulled several precepts and the city council ended up withdrawing all the complaints.
