The continuity of Laura Borràs at the head of the presidency of the Parliament hangs by a thread. The Superior Court of Justice has decided to send the president to trial and transfers the debate to the Parliamentary Board, which must now decide whether to vote for her suspension. The magistrate of the civil and criminal chamber, Carlos Ramos, has issued the order to open the oral trial this Tuesday, which will force the Parliament to decide whether to immediately suspend the president based on article 25.4 of the regulations of the Catalan chamber. This article establishes the immediate suspension of the deputies against whom an oral trial is opened "for crimes related to corruption." The Table of the Parlament was meeting this Tuesday, in its ordinary appointment, when the news has transpired, but the matter has not been addressed. ERC, PSC and the CUP have a majority to force the suspension of the president.
The opening of the trial against Borràs was an expected and inevitable decision after the TSJC rejected all the resources that the president presented against his prosecution and once the possibilities of appeal were exhausted. Borràs came to present a recusal incident against the magistrate at the last minute, which he rejected, accusing her of "abuse of rights" to try to delay her trial.
The president of the Parlament and leader of Junts will sit in the dock of the accused in a trial for which there is still no date. She will be accompanied on the bench by her friend Isaías Herrero, whom she allegedly wanted to benefit by dividing the contracts for the computer service when she presided over the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes. The Prosecutor's Office in its indictment indicates that Borràs and his friend Isaías Herrero acted "by mutual agreement" to unduly split various minor contracts so as not to exceed the threshold of 18,000 euros "with the purpose of violating the principles of transparency and public competition".
For both, the Prosecutor's Office requests a sentence of 6 years in prison and 21 years of disqualification from holding public office. The third defendant is Andreu P., who allegedly prepared invoices that allowed the irregularities to be masked and who faces a sentence of three years in prison and ten years of disqualification. Despite the fact that the judge also appreciated that Borràs had committed embezzlement and fraud, the prosecution ended up accusing her of two crimes: prevarication and falsehood.
Faced with this discrepancy between the judicial investigation and the prosecutor's accusation, the magistrate points out that "this technical difference is irrelevant", since it is about "the suppression of two of the four criminal types that were considered at the time by the Instructor, keeping the other two without making any changes in terms of the facts or in terms of the subjects, which falls within the powers that our criminal procedural law recognizes to the Public Prosecutor in this phase of the procedure.
