The suspended President of the Parliament Laura Borràs asks the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) to call as witnesses the former Ministers of Culture Ferran Mascarell, Santi Vila and Lluís Puig, who headed the Department when she presided over the Institution of Catalan Letters ( ILC).
In her defense brief presented before the TSJC, the leader of JxCat proposes twenty witnesses for the trial that will be held against her for allegedly splitting ILC contracts to award them by finger to a friend, a case for which the Prosecutor's Office asks her six years in prison and 21 years of disqualification.
Borràs, who last July was suspended as president of the Parliament after the TSJC opened an oral trial on her, wants these witnesses to prove "the certainty, reality and quality" of the works investigated, whose "materialization", according to her defense , is "questioned" by the Prosecutor's Office.
According to his lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, this is "useful, necessary and pertinent" testimonial evidence to prove the "quality, necessity and cost" of the work that, according to the Prosecutor's Office, Borràs arbitrarily awarded to his friend Isaiah H..
The three councilors mentioned led the Ministry of Culture during the period in which Borràs presided over the Institution of Catalan Letters, between 2013 and 2018.
In the case of Lluís Puig, who was Minister of Culture when the Parliament approved the DUI and who resides in Brussels (Belgium) subtracted from Spanish justice, the defense requests that he declare in accordance with the directives of the European Parliament that allows testimonies by videoconference.
In his brief, Boye limits himself to denying the facts that the Prosecutor's Office attributes to Borràs and the existence of the crimes that the justice system imputes to him: "Disagreeing with the correlatives of the accusation, there has been no splitting of contracts, no punishable falsehoods or arbitrary decisions.
It also proposes Oriol Ponsatí as a witness, who succeeded Borràs at the head of the ILC and was appointed by her when former president Quim Torra appointed her Minister of Culture.
The defense of Borràs advises the TSJC that it will ask for an extension of the qualification deadline, pending the experts' preparation of a report on the computerized documentation involved in the case, which it claims has not been transferred in its entirety.
The emails intervened in the case, mainly in the computers of the friend of Borràs who was awarded the investigated works, are a key piece in the process against the suspended president of the Parliament.
