The National Court has imposed sentences of up to seven years in prison on former senior officials and civil servants of the government of Esperanza Aguirre in the Community of Madrid, including her former advisor Alfredo Prada, for lack of control in the failure of the macro-project of the City of Justice. The judges impose seven years in prison on Prada, former vice-president of the Community of Madrid, and oblige him to pay 40 million euros to the public coffers of Madrid along with three other defendants. The other four are sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
In addition to Prada, Isabelino Baños, Alicio de las Heras, Andrés Gómez Gordo and Félix José García de Castro, all the members of the team who participated in the development of the project, are sentenced. The sentences are slightly lower due to the application of the mitigating circumstance of excessive delays. Prada is found guilty of prevarication and embezzlement, and the others as necessary collaborators.
The National Court’s ruling demonstrates the lack of control in the execution of almost all the steps necessary to launch the project. There was “intense contracting activity” in which the defendants, led by Aguirre’s right-hand man, “ignored all economic forecasts, dispensed with any cost study, evaded administrative controls” and awarded contract after contract that “were far from being increasingly in line with social standards.”
The sentence quantifies the embezzlement hole in the flagship project of the Esperanza Aguirre government: 40.4 million euros. An amount that, according to the judges, is “extremely serious.” It was she who, according to the trial, said that it was necessary to hire the architect Norman Foster and that this alone cost “more than 13 million euros,” the judges emphasize. In total, more than 40 million that are part of the embezzlement. “Such an amount is of extraordinary importance and has clearly influenced the production of damage to the public service.”
A “theme park on automatic bombings”
The trial took place last May and the prosecution made its prison requests final, up to eight years in prison for Alfredo Prada, former vice-president of the Community of Madrid during that term of Esperanza Aguirre and responsible for the project. He and the other defendants denied the irregularities, while the prosecutor in charge of the case clearly stated that the project had buried hundreds of millions of euros of public money to launch a failed “automobile theme park”.
“I signed what they asked me to do,” Prada said throughout her statement. This was a constant allegation among former senior officials and officials of the Justice Campus, denying irregularities or offloading controversial decisions onto their superiors. One of them was Esperanza Aguirre, who also appeared as a witness to defend from the first to the last stone the failed project that Isabel Díaz Ayuso is now trying to resurrect with a new investment of $1 million.
“No, not at all,” the former Madrid president replied when asked about the series of irregularities that investigators say took place throughout the project. The accused, he said, were not required to provide him with detailed information about how the work was being carried out. “It was something that everyone agreed on, it was not an idea of Esperanza Aguirre as they say, it would never have occurred to me,” he said.
