Committing crimes under the noses of judges

Arts and crime have always thrived together"

JG Ballard

Stop Lupin, Rocambole or any other white-collar thief willing to take all kinds of risks to take what you want from their owners or the police themselves. All of these stories are overshadowed by the one whose protagonist is Alfredo Prada – former second vice-president and Minister of Justice of the Community of Madrid –, Esperanza Aguirre’s left hand when Francisco Granados was her right hand, and the fact is that the frogs came en masse to the countess’s house.

I tell you a sentence that puts the icing on the cake of a bizarre and strange event since its origins and in which Prada and the CAM did not hesitate to use the judges, their bosses, to give shine and rank to their actions. Now that he is sentenced to seven years in prison for a continuous crime of prevarication in the media competition with a continuous crime of aggravated embezzlement, many images and stories of those years that I witnessed come to mind. I am not going to say that it smelled bad, we had no data, but it was from the beginning an absurdity that almost no one missed, despite the fact that so many people had to dance to the tune that Doña Esperanza played, how good she was.

It all started at the end of 2004 when the news reached the judicial headquarters that the Community was launching a project to move them from the capital of Madrid – that’s nothing – to a single place located in Valdebebas, north of the city and, as they all said, at the end of the world. The dozens of meetings they held with legal operators in which they were explained that it was not a good idea to gather all the seats and all the jurisdictions and all the courts in the same place were useless; that they were going to start a riot, that it was necessary to study the evolution of traffic flows if there was an influx of people every morning towards there, in short, that it made no sense to have the criminal and contentious-administrative courts together, that there was no need since they are not the same users or lawyers who attend them. I remember that they suggested that if the many judicial buildings in the centre of Madrid were to be removed, it would be better to group them into several campuses at different points: the criminal campus, the civil campus, etc. There was nothing to be done, they listened to no one. The macro-project was the key objective. Needless to say, no one was happy with the project, because no one – neither the civil servants, nor the judges, nor the prosecutors, nor the lawyers – had any interest in settling near Barajas after having had their whole life so well organised. It was, at the very least, a story from Aguirre’s milkmaid who was considering financing such madness with the sale of the entire judicial headquarters of Madrid; some are as attractive to build as the great Palace of Justice in the Plaza de Castilla. “It will not cost the citizens a cent,” the leader repeated.

Then came the question of the doughnuts. In 2005, an ideas competition was held in which more than 400 architects participated with ideas that were probably creative but mostly unsuitable for court buildings. The president of the High Court of Madrid, where I worked, came back completely devastated from the sessions in which he was called to be part of the jury. “The doughnuts, we had to approve the one about doughnuts,” he told me with a sad face. As stated in the judgment, the Roscos’ project was that of the architects Frechilla and López-Peláez, which included up to 14 circular buildings of different sizes and shapes to house the court buildings. “Who can think of it! Circular buildings for the courts, with no possibility of expansion when they become small, which is what they will remain, as if they had not learned with the Constitutional Court!” lamented the president. When I asked him how they had not forced him to be someone else, he sadly replied that among the finalists there were some craziest ones, like the one who, under the slogan of “making justice more humane”, presented a kind of city with houses and cottages of different sizes to house the courts and judicial bodies, ten here, eight there: “I told them that if they chose this model, I could not assure them that neither I nor my driver would be able to access the court any day. My president was a reluctant Galician, but he must have suffered from the advertising megalomania of the Prada adviser, which earned him seven years in prison.

It was time for the mega-contract with Foster and Partners to design the buildings of our own headquarters, the Superior Court, and that of the Provincial Court of Madrid. There, Prada went to London and signed a contract, like everyone else, as the judgment says, without resorting in the least to the laws on public procurement. “Have you seen?” –said my pressure–, “they designed buildings with observation rooms on the roof, so that the streams of people would flow through the building and be nice and sunny in the summer and nice and cold in the winter…” Foster’s pilot doughnuts had nothing on them either.

Esperanza Aguirre and Prada took the judges to lay the first stone in January 2007. It seems that the event cost a million and a half, in the presence of the president of the CGPJ himself, Hernando; the attorney general of the state, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, and even Fraga Iribarne. I must say that I do not know if by luck or by judgment, my president hid among the others and did not come out in the front row like those mentioned, placing his little hand on Esperanza’s and on the stone. From there came the delirium. There were only acts, small acts and great acts. Books published on Foster and the campus, advertising in the media, buses in the streets to publicize the project, creation of a “Campus of Justice brand”, security of the works that did not start, digital magazines, videos, art exhibitions on Justice. – I still have the catalogue – and a whole advertising arsenal in which they took the judges like shakers so that they could preside, inaugurate and accompany. And no one liked the idea of ​​going where Christ lost his sandal, but what do they want since the material resources of the courts are provided by the autonomous communities, you have to signal to them if you want to have dignity? tables and computers at the headquarters … and not even for those. “The construction of the campus became something secondary and they used very important economic resources in promotional and advertising activities, while moving away from the purpose of the company, which was not the promotion of architectural projects but rather their execution” reads the judgment of the National Court.

Between 2005 and 2008, under the eyes of the judges, they awarded contracts worth 332 million, without the slightest respect for the legislation on public procurement and without the majority behaving like advertisers. This is what the AN now condemns, but it does not clarify in any way why or why they did it. It was not the subject of the procedure, but the mind cannot be constrained by the mastery of the cause. How many useless contracts? Why were the legal mechanisms not used to contract? We are not going to think that Prada gave money to suppliers, agencies, media and others simply out of a desire to publicize the project that it was passionate about and that to do so, it had to do it fraudulently. It will be because even The Fat Manthe commissioner of Kitchenwas in the middle; It will be because the Fundescam file had already been filed in court due to prescription; It may be because the mechanics rhyme, but the truth is that it seems to me that this sentence did not raise all the waters of a new episode of the pond that was a quagmire. In broad daylight, in front of the judges, without any blush. Prada, this man decorated with the Raimunda.

And watch out, Ayuso is threatening to attack the Campus again, that desolate field with the lonely morgue doughnut.

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