Today, at ten in the morning, the trial for the so-called Erial case begins in the fourth section of the Valencia Court, with Eduardo Zaplana, former president of the Generalitat Valenciana and ex-minister of the executive of José María Aznar, as the main defendant. It is an oral hearing that has been postponed twice: the first, on January 9, due to the illness of the Anticorruption prosecutor, and the second, on February 1, due to the illness of the former president’s lawyer.
Zaplana faces a sentence request from the prosecutor of 19 years in prison. He is accused of having collected and laundered bribes (with purchases of flats, plots or vehicles) worth more than 20 million euros in ITV and wind farm awards when he was president of Valencia, in 1997. About he is suspected of having committed the crimes of criminal organization, money laundering, bribery, fraud and falsification of documents.
Together with Zaplana, the former Valencian president and former president of Bancaja, José Luis Olivas, is also accused of having received a bribe of 580,000 euros, in addition to close collaborators such as his alleged frontman Joaquín Barceló, who was the his chief of staff at the Generalitat Valenciana Francisco Grau, Juan Francisco García or his personal secretary Mitsouko Henríquez. The former president, who suffers from leukemia, has always defended his innocence. Some of the defendants have already reached an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to avoid prison in exchange for acknowledging the facts.
The oral hearing will be a formidable opportunity to conduct an autopsy, through evidence and witnesses, at a time, an era, in which the Valencian PP established the foundations of a model of public resource management, and of complicity between administrators and private companies, which allowed this party to reach a hegemony that lasted for 20 years, but which has been full of cases of corruption.
The trial will help dissect in full detail not only the operation that the Prosecutor’s Office details in its qualification, with the participation of frontmen, tax havens, offshore companies and close complicity both in politics and in business, but also a institutional system that later conditioned the executives of José Luis Olivas, Francisco Camps and Alberto Fabra.
Whatever the verdict, this trial will be a good opportunity to delve into a period in which political and institutional practices were forged that, years later, would lead to the disappearance of “all” the Valencian financial system (Bancaja, Banc de València and CAM), in the closing of Channel 9, in the indebtedness of the Valencian Administration and in the outbreak of corruption cases that would end up deteriorating the image of Valencians.
The origin of the illicit funds allegedly managed by Zaplana is in the tenders that the Generalitat launched to privatize the ITVs and in the wind farm concessions, which were designed with “subjective conditions” so that certain companies won the tenders “in detriment of other competitors”, always according to the prosecutor. One of the beneficiaries was the family of the deceased former councilor and former director of the National Police, Juan Cotino. And for this to be possible, the necessary conditions were created at the “highest level political bodies”.
The former minister was arrested on May 22, 2018. The origin of the Erial case is in five typewritten sheets that were found by a Syrian citizen who had rented a house that had been owned by Zaplana. This citizen gave these sheets, full of plasters, to Marcos Benavent, known as the “money junkie” and made them available to justice in his time of “repentance”. These sheets outline the methodology that was used to obtain the concessions for ITV and wind farms. Even with the amounts that the bidders had to pay in commissions to obtain these awards.
