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The last legend of smuggling in Galicia and former mayor of the PP sits on the bench

2022-02-12T20:00:14.478Z


Nené Barral will be tried in July for allegedly moving tobacco caches from his Ribadumia town hall office more than 20 years ago


Nené Barral, during a trial for tax fraud in 2016. OSCAR CORRAL

The Customs Surveillance investigation for tobacco smuggling against the influential mayor of Ribadumia (Pontevedra) José Ramón Barral,

Nené

, for which he was arrested and forced to resign in 2001, languished for 23 years in a Vilagarcía de Arousa court.

When the case seemed doomed to file, after the number of defendants was reduced to less than half, with three of them already deceased, the Provincial Court of Pontevedra opened a trial against Barral and the organization that he supposedly directed from the mayor's office to move the caches.

After the failed attempt of the Prosecutor's Office to reach an agreement, the smuggling case comes to trial as the oldest in Spain.

The court of the fourth section of the Court will seat the alleged smuggler mayor on the bench on July 26, with at least three days of trial scheduled, as confirmed by sources from the Superior Court of Justice of Galicia.

Barral, 78 years old and who turned 18 with the baton, is one of the living legends of tobacco smuggling in Galicia and the supposed proof of the old links of politics with the tobacco growers.

His trial closes three decades of history in which smuggler networks made huge fortunes, protected by police corruption and in a propitious political environment.

In 2004, the Pontevedra Prosecutor's Office declared the business in Galicia exhausted.

The former mayor of the PP, who has always denied his relationship with smuggling, faces a sentence of 10 and a half years in prison and a fine of 15 million euros for alleged crimes of smuggling, bribery and illicit association.

Although the accusation came to implicate direct relatives of the former politician, the prosecutor withdrew the accusation against all of them except his brother Feliciano Barral, who was then president of the local executive of the PP, for whom he requests a six-year prison sentence.

The economic part of the case focused on Switzerland, where the Tax Agency searched for the alleged piggy bank that Barral kept in banks in the Swiss country and in which he allegedly laundered contraband money, but in the end it was not found.

This investigation delayed the investigation for years until, in 2016, the prosecutor's indictment arrived.

The public ministry maintained the charges against the former politician thanks to the fact that prescription was avoided due to the existence of a crime of bribery.

The smuggling evidence used by the prosecution, including dozens of phone taps, place Barral in his office at the mayor's office.

Neither in the golden years for tobacco growers, nor in the midst of the outbreak of the raid that dismantled the largest smuggling cartel in the Arousa estuary (from which the historic drug traffickers emerged), had convincing data appeared to incriminate him in the business.

In fact, in the historic flight of smugglers to Portugal to escape a raid in December 1983, Barral was the mayor of his town.

Then already several police reports slipped the possible double life of him.

It was his fourth absolute majority that choked the mayor.

In 1996, Customs managed to prosecute the investigation that came to attribute to Barral the ownership of two fishing boats and a merchant ship to introduce non-EU tobacco into Spain and other EU countries.

The investigators placed the mayor at the top of a network made up of people of Portuguese, Dutch, Swiss, Croatian, American, English and Polish nationality, an activity with which in two years he would have defrauded 4.3 million euros.

Customs documents at least three operations whose organization it attributes to the one who at that time was the almighty alderman of Ribadumia and a prominent member of Manuel Fraga's PP in the province of Pontevedra thanks to his links with the businessman Vicente Otero,

Terito

, a personal friend of the then president. of the Xunta.

The investigation details how on February 25, 1999, a Customs plane sighted the mother ship and the fishing boat that was going to lighten the cargo.

Blows in the mayor's office

The Prosecutor's Office maintains that Barral "maintained close ties of friendship with civil guards, and simultaneously had information on the actions of Customs Surveillance."

The information that these officials supposedly provided to the former mayor to guarantee the transfer of the caches to Galicia even suspended two operations scheduled by the organization in the months of February and October 1999, the accusation maintains.

When there was already a boarding order issued by the National High Court, Barral allegedly received a leak from two customs officials and suspended the transfer.

The prosecutor points out calls that informants make to his City Hall office and in which they also warn him that his communications have been intercepted.

Even so, the alderman undertakes another attempt with Customs hot on his heels.

In October 2000, he again aborted the operation when his lieutenants identified some Customs vehicles that were monitoring a Barral meeting in one of his warehouses.

The Customs Surveillance investigation achieved its objective on May 14, 2001, when the ship carrying four containers with 432,000 packs of the Magnum Especial brand, camouflaged between plywood, arrived at the port of Vigo.

Hours later, agents arrested the mayor at his home in Ribadumia and, although he was released on bail, Barral was forced to resign after 18 years in office.

"No one under suspicion can govern the destinies of a people, which is above everything," he proclaimed as he left in an extraordinary plenary session packed with supporters.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-02-12

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