The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, testified again yesterday as being investigated before the court, this time denounced by an investment fund that accuses her of pressuring them to allocate part of their housing to social rent. The Vauras fund filed a complaint against her for a crime of coercion and prevarication and accused the City Council of forcing her to allocate properties on her property to social rent under the threat of not granting her building permits.
Colau denied in front of the judge that he gave instructions to the legal services of the Consistory to process the files against Vauras. She clarified that the sanctions that were imposed were at the proposal of the Municipal Housing Institute, in which she did not intervene. According to legal sources, the same judge asked Colau what participation he had in processing the files against the fund because his signature did not appear on any of the documents in the case.
In a statement at City Hall after appearing in court, the mayoress expressed confidence that the investigation will eventually be closed. "There is no cause. We add eleven filed complaints. It attracts a lot of attention. They are large economic operators who were not used to having a City Council stand in their way", he denounced. "There is a vulture fund that, because it doesn't get what it wants, tries to intimidate a City Council through complaints. We are more convinced than ever that as a City Council we must enforce the law", he reiterated. During the questioning, the fund's lawyers announced that they will summon several witnesses to testify, therefore it is assumed that the case will last until after the municipal elections.
The investigating judge 18 of Barcelona who took his statement dismissed the complaint against Colau in November 2020. The Prosecutor's Office itself also opposed its acceptance. Neither the judge nor the Prosecutor's Office appreciated that the actions of the municipal officials constituted a crime. However, the decision was appealed on the merits before the Barcelona Court, which ordered the reopening of the investigation and asked to summon the mayoress and two councilors to testify in this case. The court considered that "it would be reprehensible if, in order to obtain those transfers of homes, the property owners were pressured to paralyze their building permits and to cause them harm if they did not accede to this claim".
The City Council sanctioned the investment fund after the eviction of Bloc Llavors, a building in Poble Sec where six families who could not pay the rent lived. After the eviction, the councilor for housing, Lucía Martín, announced that the property would be fined for evicting the families without offering social rent and ended up sanctioning the fund with 417,000 euros for breaching the Catalan housing law. However, the Constitutional Court annulled several precepts of that law and the City Council ended up withdrawing all sanctions.
This case was also filed by the judge, with the support of the Prosecutor's Office, seeing no evidence of a crime, but the Barcelona Court also ordered it to be reopened. He estimated that direct and repeated awarding can mean "the breach of the essential requirement of publicity, transparency, competition, objectivity, equality and non-discrimination" that subsidies must have.
