From the left, Pablo Crespo and Francisco Correa, during a trial at the National High Court.
/ Europa Press
Those involved in the Gürtel plot will have to face a new trial.
Judge José de la Mata ordered 26 people to sit on the bench on Wednesday for the last line of investigation of the case that was still open in the National Court, referring to the structure designed to avoid payments to the Treasury and launder money.
The judge thus closes an instruction where the Prosecutor's Office asks for 77 years in prison for the two main leaders of the corruption network, Francisco Correa and Pablo Crespo, accused in this piece of more than twenty crimes.
More than 12 years after the judicial investigation of the
Gürtel case began
, the instructor José de la Mata has issued the order to open the oral trial in the last piece that remained to be concluded.
With this step, the magistrate sends the two leaders of the plot to the bench, their tax advisers (Luis de Miguel and Ramón Blanco Balín) and a whole battery of businessmen and alleged front men who participated for years in the illegal business network.
The magistrate had initially prosecuted 21 people for these events, but finally expanded the list of defendants to 26 after the appeals presented by the State Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney.
De la Mata considers the criminal role of Correa and Crespo to be credited, on whom he also imposes a bail of 33.6 million euros as a fine.
The first obtained "multimillion dollar amounts" through a "complex corporate and financial structure" created to defraud the Treasury.
The second, for its part, allegedly concealed an important part of the economic resources it obtained through its "intermediation in irregular adjudications" and in "investments made with Correa."
"There are elements that allow to affirm incidentally that we are dealing with frameworks specifically designed, from its very conception, with the sole purpose of defrauding the payment of taxes," the judge rivets in his car.
Six derivatives of Gürtel have already been tried and another six, including this piece, are pending sentencing or holding the trial.
The last oral hearing ended last July due to the diversion of public funds in the organization of Benedict XVI's visit to Valencia in 2006, the failure of which is still unknown.
The next one starts on February 8, 2021 and deals with the papers of former treasurer Luis Bárcenas, a piece that still has another part in instruction after reopening.