Magistrate Andrés Palomo Del Arco has issued an order in which he proceeds against the Popular Party deputy Alberto Casero for alleged crimes of administrative prevarication and embezzlement of public funds in relation to five service contracts, sponsorship or agreements signed when he was mayor of Trujillo (Cáceres) in 2017 and 2018, with third parties, without being subject to the legally established administrative procedures.
Casero came to the fore a little over a year ago when he erred in the vote in Congress on the government's labor reform, which allowed the approval in extremis of the norm promoted by the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, after that the deputies of Navarra Suma deviate from a previous agreement that facilitated validation.
In his order to transform the case into an abbreviated procedure, the investigator gives the prosecutor ten days to request the opening of the oral trial by formulating the indictment or the dismissal of the same.
The magistrate explains that the facts that, with the provisional and indicative nature of this phase, are attributed to the person investigated are related to actions carried out in his capacity as Mayor of the Trujillo City Council and contracting body in the same, between March 2017 and December 2018 by arranging with different people and entities, service contracts, sponsorship or agreements, failing to comply with all types of formalities required for this purpose, by the applicable regulations in each case.
It adds that although this regulation, in some of the cases, did not establish demanding validity requirements, in view of the condition and characteristics of each of them, in general minor contracts, however, "it did establish formalities aimed at least at confirm its existence in the Consistory through the opening of the corresponding file containing the due resolution by the contracting body approving the expense, with justification of its need and the subsequent contribution of the invoice corresponding to the works object of the contract”.
For the magistrate, the reported conduct falls within the crime of administrative prevarication, resulting from the aforementioned well-founded evidence, and "not only involves repeated and admitted administrative irregularities, but a way of proceeding by the taxpayer who identifies his voluntarism regardless of any interpretation with a loophole of rationality in the legal system; with prohibited verbal contracts or without any processing or publicity in the cases that the amount required it, circumvention of control mechanisms, direct assumption of payments for the integrity of the services that, in addition to newspapers, were provided to an entity in which the municipality only it was a part; fully subsumable in the crime of prevarication”.
Likewise, it considers that the evidenced facts also fit into a crime of embezzlement of public funds that penalizes the authority or official who is in charge of the funds by reason of their functions and that far from allocating them to the fulfillment of the planned public attentions, separates them from them, and extracting them from public control for profit, incorporates them into his patrimony making them his own or consents to another doing so.
The magistrate concludes the investigation of the case once the Appeals Chamber has estimated an appeal from the appraiser against the order of the instructor, dated January 16, 2022, which denied the request for annulment, filing and dismissal of the open case against him for alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement, and that he denied that the judicial investigation period indicated in the law had expired (maximum period of 12 months from the beginning of the case except extension due to complexity).
In its order, the Chamber declared that the investigation phase of this case ended on June 15, 2022, as the period established by law had elapsed, so that, consequently, the investigative measures after that date could not be founded. the resolutions that the instructor should adopt regarding the continuation of the process or its filing.
In relation to this matter, the investigator explains in his order that all the evidence that appears in the case, was already working in the Trujillo Court and was sent with the reasoned memory on the jurisdiction of this Second Chamber, and even to a large extent was apart from the documentation that the Prosecutor's Office sent to the Court with the complaint that gave rise to the initiation of the Preliminary Proceedings, which scrupulously observes the decision of the Appeals Chamber to deal exclusively with the investigative proceedings carried out with prior to July 15, 2022.
