Two of the main convicts for the Gürtel plot coincide in semi-liberty in the same Center for Social Insertion in Madrid

Pablo Crespo arrives on February 20, together with his lawyer, at the headquarters of the National Court, where he is tried in another piece of the 'Gürtel case'. Alejandro Martínez Vélez (Europa Press)

The former leader of the PP of Galicia and

confessed to the Gürtel plot, Pablo Crespo, has entered the Victoria Kent Center for Social Insertion (CIS) in the center of Madrid this Monday, to serve in third degree prison or semi-liberty what his sentence remains, as confirmed to EL PAÍS by several prison sources.

In this prison, reserved for prisoners in the open regime, he will coincide with other of the main prisoners convicted by that network, the former treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas, who has been in semi-liberty since the end of December and with whom he already shared confinement in the Madrid prison of Soto del Real.

Crespo, sentenced in five pieces of the macro-cause of corruption to a total of 73 years and 4 months in prison, will remain in the center until prison professionals design an execution plan for the remainder of his sentence in the coming days and which will include daily departures after he has justified that he has an offer to work in a law firm after studying law during his imprisonment.

This plan will determine if he should go to the prison to sleep and for how many days, or even if he remains under some telematic control system and, therefore, spends the night at his home and does not have to go to the CIS.

More information

Setback to Camps: the Court rejects the attempt to discredit a witness who pointed to him in the Gürtel trial

Semi-freedom has reunited Crespo and Bárcenas, although both have arrived at it by different paths.

In the case of the former, last December Penitentiary Institutions refused to grant him the third degree that he now enjoys, considering that, although his behavior in prison was good and his evolution favorable, the seriousness of the crimes committed and, above all, that he still If he had nine of the 18 years remaining to serve his maximum sentence, it was necessary to wait at least another six months before granting him this prison benefit.

Crespo appealed this decision and on February 16 Judge María Reyes Jimeno revoked the decision of the Interior and granted him semi-liberty.

The magistrate's decision weighed the support of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office for Crespo's request.

The public ministry presented a letter in which it highlighted that the

of the Gürtel had not only acknowledged his participation in the corruption plot, "but that of the other defendants, providing documentation that accredited his confession story."

Anticorruption highlighted that this collaboration was being maintained in the trial that is currently being held at the National Court for one of the pieces of the summary, the one corresponding to the Valencian plot and that sits on the bench the former president of the Generalitat Francisco Camps and Crespo himself .

However, in the case of Bárcenas, sentenced to 29 years and one month in prison in the main piece of the

, it was Penitentiary Institutions that promoted the improvement of their penitentiary situation.

On December 20, the Interior decided that article 100.2 of the Penitentiary Regulations should apply to the former PP senator, even though he was still in the second degree prison, which allowed him to access third degree benefits.

This resulted in his transfer to the CIS Victoria Kent and the subsequent authorization to leave every weekday from 7:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., in addition to spending weekends and holidays at his home.

Interior granted him this benefit after the former treasurer justified that he was going to work as an accountant for a company owned by his son Guillermo, a musician and leader of the band Taburete, and that he had registered as a volunteer in a soup kitchen run by a religious order.

The Prosecutor's Office appealed the Interior's decision, considering that the ministry had made the life regime of the former PP treasurer excessively flexible.

On February 20, Judge Jimeno agreed with Anti-Corruption when she considered that, in order to comply with the treatment and reinsertion programs that Bárcenas followed, it was not necessary "to grant outings every weekend and on holidays, nor to grant of 48 days of leave typical of the third degree ”, benefits that he withdrew.

According to prison sources, the former PP treasurer continues to leave prison 15 hours a day to work, but on weekends he must go to sleep even though he goes out to help in the soup kitchen.

Restorative Dialogues

During the time that Bárcenas and Crespo have been in the Soto del Real prison before going to semi-liberty, they both followed a Restorative Dialogues workshop, a reintegration program that concludes with a meeting between the inmate and a direct or symbolic victim to ask for forgiveness.

It is the same prison workshop in which the former vice president of the Government Rodrigo Rato participated in his day, convicted of the

to whom the judge granted conditional release in February 2021.

In the case of the ex-treasurer of the PP, in the same order in which he ordered to cut his exit regime, the judge proposed that he now continue the Program for Intervention in Economic Crimes (Pideco), a re-education plan for those convicted of corruption launched in Spanish prisons in January 2021. This is the program that, for example.

Iñaki Urdangarin followed, after which the husband of the Infanta Cristina agreed to parole in March last year.

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