The Court of Seville annuls the judicial case investigating the husband of the former director of the Civil Guard

The Court of Seville has annulled the case investigating the businessman Juan Carlos Martínez, husband of the former director general of the Civil Guard María Gámez, by continuing a judicial investigation despite the fact that the legal deadlines had expired. This formal defect knocks down the investigation for money laundering, embezzlement and prevarication of the Sevillian Court of Instruction number 6, and which ended last March with the career of Gámez, who resigned hours after the case against his partner was revealed.

The defense of a brother-in-law of Gámez, also under investigation, argued before the Court that the investigation of the Court of Instruction 6 had exceeded the deadlines set by the Law of Criminal Procedure and that the Supreme Court had clarified that they were "mandatory". Martínez, who has been under investigation since last March, was accused of having indirectly received funds from the Junta de Andalucía between 2009 and 2011, when the PSOE was in government, through a company owned by his brother Bienvenido.

The magistrates of the Sevillian Court conclude that the investigation by the investigating judge José Ignacio Vilaplana against Martínez should have ended on July 29, 2022, but both he and his brother were summoned as investigated on February 22, 2023. Therefore, all decisions and inquiries of the Court of Instruction 6 after July 2022 are annulled. The Supreme Court clarified in previous rulings that the deadlines set by Article 324 of the Lecrim, set in 2015 to prevent judicial investigations from being eternal, are "procedural deadlines of their own, without the possibility of recovery (...) they are not flexible, but imperative or exhaustive," recalls the order of the Court, dated last Tuesday and advanced this Friday by Diario de Sevilla.

In the court that instructs the macro-cause of the ERE with its 140 pieces, the 6th of Instruction in Seville, this obligation to extend the investigations from time to time, has taken its toll and on occasions like this has put an end to ongoing investigations. Now the judges of the Court understand that on July 29, 2022, when the investigation period was not extended, "a situation of procedural crisis" occurred.

The investigations against Martínez were derived from the case opened against the defunct car company Santana Motor, with the participation of the Junta de Andalucía, and detached in turn in 2015 from the ERE case. In the case that will be closed as soon as the investigating judge complies with the order of the Court, the Martinez brothers, the former director of the Idea agency Jacinto Cañete and the former administrator of the public company Fagia Carlos Fernández are accused.

The Sevillian Court highlights in its order that it is "evident" that the people investigated in the case that will now be archived "were already being investigated for the same facts in the previous preliminary proceedings 3969/2015 [of Santana Motor]". The magistrates consider that with regard to the procedural deadlines, "their origin cannot be ignored, nor their subsequent procedural vicissitudes", so that their charges should have been extended according to the case of Santana Motor.

A year ago, the Isofoton case, with 38 people under investigation and which investigated the aid of the Junta de Andalucía to the Malaga energy company of the same name, was overturned by the Sevillian Court for a similar defect, having extended the investigation for four months in an irregular manner in 2017. In this case, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office had pointed to Ministers María Jesús Montero and Luis Planas, as former Andalusian ministers of Health and Agriculture, Fisheries and the Environment, who granted aid of 8.3 million to the company Isofoton in 2012, but the investigations were stopped in their tracks by the legal deadlines to extend the investigation.

Juan Carlos Martínez's company, Job Management Liberty S.L., received funding from the firm Experience Management Group S.L., owned by his brother Bienvenido, president of Santana Motor between 2009 and 2011. After leaving the Board, Bienvenido created advisory and management companies that received $1.3 million in funding from the agencies where he had previously been a director. In addition, the investigation highlights that Gámez's husband received 128,880 euros from the pharmaceutical laboratories Rovi, subsidized by the Idea agency, of which his brother Bienvenido was a director. Juan Carlos Martínez was a director of the Board's companies Incuba, Soprea and Fagia in 2010 and 2011.

The lawyers who have now won the appeal upheld by the Court, Juan Carlos Alférez and Manuel Pérez Cuajares, from the law firm Constitución 23, Estudio de Litigación, praise the fact that the magistrates have shared their opinion that the case against Martínez was linked to the previous one from which it emerged, that of Santana Motor. "Instead of immediately creating a new separate piece for that new object [the investigation against Martínez], its division is delayed in time after the new piece is created, it is intended that the time-limiters are set to zero, when this is a clear fraud of the law."

In other words, the lawyers emphasize that the deadlines that an investigating judge must respect are those of the original piece from which other investigated pieces connected to the first one emerge: "The appealed decision contains a very interesting legal formulation that, accepting the challenge that we proposed in our appeals, establishes that when an investigation is divided into separate pieces, The initial period of the expiry periods is not that of the initiation of the new process, but that of the future of the parent part from which it comes, provided that the object of the separate part has already been investigated within the matrix".

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Read more

I'm already a subscriber

_