The Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested the Supreme Court not to admit the appeal filed by the PSPV-PSOE against the acquittal of the former President of the Generalitat Valenciana, Francisco Camps, issued by the National Court in the context of the latest piece of the Gürtel case.
Last October, the PSOE announced an appeal in cassation before the Supreme Court against the sentence of May 27 that acquitted the former ‘popular’ leader of the crime of influence peddling in concurrence with prevarication, for which he had been accused in the Gürtel case trial related to contracts awarded to the company Orange Market, belonging to the network.
In the appeal signed by former PSPV-PSOE deputies Carmen Ninet and Cristina Moreno, the socialists, who acted as public prosecutors at the trial, argued, among other things, that the sentence had violated a constitutional provision, claiming that their right to effective judicial protection and the obligation to justify the rulings had been infringed; in addition to infringement of the law or procedural irregularity.
They argued that the very qualified analogous mitigating circumstance of confession had been improperly appreciated in relation to the convicted accused or that there was a «manifest contradiction» between the proven facts, as well as the «indeterminacy and confusion» of their statements regarding the involvement of certain accused persons, in contrast to the specification of facts with concepts that, due to their legal nature, «predetermine the judgment.»
However, in a document dated February 17 and accessed by Europa Press, the prosecutor points out that the appealed sentence dedicates pages 77 to 187 to analyze the evaluation of the evidence for each accused person that led to their conviction or acquittal.
«Well, one may or may not agree with this evaluation, but what cannot be affirmed — as the reproach does — is that there was no justification. What could be done (an option that has not been used) is to raise a reason for error in the evaluation of the evidence, (…) if, of course, documents in the case file were indicated that demonstrate the judge’s mistake without being contradicted by other pieces of evidence,» he argues.
Furthermore, he considers that the agreement of several accused persons at the beginning of the oral trial did not generate defenselessness for the rest.
«In our case,» he continues, «the oral trial was conducted as if there had been no agreement, with the clarification that certain accused persons confessed to the facts and accepted the sentences requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office. The public prosecution was able to present the evidence that, having been admitted, it deemed appropriate. There has been no defenselessness — neither procedural because there is no access to the appeal (this cassation challenge is an example of that), nor material because the trial sentence determines which crimes the accused are convicted of.»
COSTS
Therefore, the prosecutor requests the inadmissibility of the appeal in cassation and imposes the costs on the appellants.
With the sentence issued by the National Court, Francisco Camps ended a judicial journey without being convicted in any of the various cases in which he had been investigated and tried.
On the other hand, the court did condemn the Gürtel leader, Francisco Correa, his ‘number two,’ Pablo Crespo, and the head of Orange Market, Álvaro Pérez ‘El Bigotes,’ to two years and three months in prison following the agreement of conformity with the Public Prosecutor’s Office’s indictment.
