The judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz has agreed to file the separate piece of the 3 percent case in which several CDC charges were being investigated for donations to the party with the alleged purpose of illegally financing said formation, since it was not recorded ” any indication that proves a mechanism for the outcrop of black money.â€
In a car, the magistrate explains that insufficient evidence has been found to bring those investigated to trial after the analysis by the Civil Guard of the cash income operation linked to donations to the party.
Specifically, it was examined whether a system had been devised based on the reversal in the form of cash of the donation made by those investigated as a form of compensation for the initial income, so that the cash held by the CDC and presumably by illegal origin, would pass to the legal economic circuit using the simulation of a donation, instead of being a contribution made voluntarily by the donor.
Pedraz indicates that those investigated declared that the donations made responded to extraordinary contributions that were requested by the CDC in their capacity as militants and, in particular, in response to the public office or institutional responsibility that some of them held as a result of the problems of treasury that they were told was undergoing training in those years. “The explanation given, with what has been done, has not been distorted,” stresses the magistrate.
On the one hand, he explains, it cannot be affirmed that the donations made were intended to introduce into the economic traffic amounts from a previous illegal act. “There is no basis to affirm that the origin of the funds came from the Palau case plot, since there is no diligence to prove it,” he warns.
For the magistrate, as some of the defenses point out, the donations made to the CDC party would be transparent, in the case of information that had already existed for years in the accounting provided to the Court of Accounts (as would also emerge from the documentation intervened at the entrance and registration practiced at the headquarters of said party in October 2015) and that would be duly documented in accordance with Organic Law 8/2007, on financing of political parties.
On the other hand, he continues, neither would the coincidence in time between the donations made by the different individuals investigated and the alleged income in their accounts serve as an indication. Thus, as they also point out, accounting information has been analyzed in duplicate: the database intervened at the CDC headquarters by the Civil Guard (based on the Daily Book) and on the other hand the CDC accounting (based on the General Ledger ), in which the same donation appeared on slightly different dates. “This duplication of accounting sources would cause confusion. It would be an error due to the duplication of accounting sources â€, he concludes.
In relation to the last report provided by the Civil Guard dated last April, the judge maintains that “the truth is that no element is followed from it that supports the alleged facts” and is limited to making a summary of the information that the different banking entities had provided without providing any information or reaching any conclusion that supports the continuation of these proceedings.
“With this, there is no evidence that proves a mechanism for the emergence of black money that was apparently delivered prior to the making of donations by those investigated to the CDC political party, nor that the money that could have been delivered to the militants had an illegal origin and even if it were, the investigated ones would have knowledge that the money delivered had an alleged origin in a previous criminal actâ€, concludes Pedraz.
