The former right-hand man of Rita Barberá, Alfonso Grau, 83 years old, today experienced the first session of the trial in which he is accused of having laundered money to finance the campaign for the 2007 local elections and those of 2011. Five agents of the UCO of the Civil Guard have confirmed this Tuesday before the judge that the PP of Valencia spent close to 2 million in the 2007 electoral campaign, a figure much higher than the 150,000 euros that the party officially declared, and that The municipal group used the same, supposedly corrupt, operation in the 2011 elections.
In addition to Alfonso Grau, the former municipal secretary of the PP Mari Carmen García Fuster sits on the bench; the former manager of the Valencia Tourism Foundation José Salinas and the former head of the Valencian Community Foundation for Urban Innovation Juan Eduardo Santón. Grau, with a history of bribery, is accused of the crimes of embezzlement and again of continuous bribery, Fuster of a continuous crime of bribery and Santón and Salinas of continuous embezzlement. Anti-corruption demands a sentence of nine years in prison for the man who was Barberá's "right-hand man", one year for García Fuster and five for both Salinas and Santon.
The agents summoned this Tuesday by the prosecutor have confirmed that they began to investigate the accounts of the PP of Valencia following the recordings of the former manager of the public company Imelsa and self-proclaimed 'money junkie', Marcos Benavente, and the communications interventions of several suspects.
They have specifically referred to a telephone conversation between María José Alcón (died in 2018), then mayor of Culture and wife of Alfonso Grau, in which she told her son "an operation of bank transfers to a municipal PP account and refund of these contributions with cash," according to one of the agents.
Thus, it was found out that the local PP managed two accounts, one in Caixabank and another in Sabadell. "The first reflected the income from the City Council for subsidies to political groups and the second was based on income from membership fees, contributions from 'collaborators and associates' and cash income made by García Fuster." Box B of the local PP was used to receive the alleged illegal financing through companies related to the party.
In this second account there were 187,450 euros, which were allocated to electoral expenses in 2011, as confirmed by one of the civil guards who participated in the investigation, and "lacked control", as it was not supervised by the central organization of the party. . "We talked about the municipal group of the PP, but those who really managed the money were Grau and Fuster," another of the agents pointed out.
If in 2007 the PP contracted most of its electoral actions with the firm Laterne, in 2011 it did the same with another company called Trasgos. "We verified that there were companies that only invoiced with Trasgos before the (2011) elections, during the campaign, and they were companies that had important economic interests with the City Council. Furthermore, a good part of them were the same ones that had already carried out this same operational in 2007", the UCO researchers have pointed out.
"The expenses incurred by the communication company hired to address the PP's events exceeded by at least 110,000 euros what was declared by the PP", so the party "must have had another source of income", they added.
The investigators have detailed in their reports an operation that consisted of public entities such as Tourism Valencia or the Foundation for Urban Innovation - which were funded by public funds - as well as companies awarded by the City Council, funds had been diverted to the companies. of communication responsible for the campaigns of the PP of Valencia.
