This Tuesday, the Government will grant a partial pardon to José Luis Peñas, the former advisor of the Popular Party of Majadahonda (Madrid) who revealed the Gürtel affair and who was sentenced to four years and nine months in prison for participation in the activities corruption plot, government sources tell elDiario.es.
The pardon does not affect the prison sentence – which was suspended by the National Court – but it will allow him to keep his position as municipal ordinance worker at Madrid City Hall. The Government bases the pardon on the existence of “reasons of justice and equity”, which are two of the three requirements, along with the public utility, that the law envisages to motivate pardon measures. His concession is part of a package aimed at strengthening the means of fighting corruption in the recovery plan to which the Executive will give the green light this Tuesday.
The royal decree that the Council of Ministers will approve commutes the two sentences of absolute ban handed down (one of three years and another of two years and one month) with two sentences of special ban for freely appointed or elected public functions. “In this way, the pardoned person can resume their livelihood, so that denouncing corruption does not ruin their life, but it does not go unpunished either,” say government sources, who argue that work de Peñas was “fundamental to being able to investigate”. “and pursue the largest corruption scheme in a democracy, which could have been very difficult without their collaboration.”
The Supreme Court and the prosecution ruled in favor of granting this partial pardon. The report of the judges of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court highlighted the attitude of Peñas over all these years and the data he made available to Justice. They stressed that “despite his conviction”, he appeared as a witness in all the parts of the case and that “in each of them, his testimony was consistent, fortuitous and even courageous”. For its part, the prosecution took as a reference the community directive relating to the protection of whistleblowers.
Your recordings, fundamental evidence
On November 7, 2007, Peñas presented the UDEF with a detailed complaint and dozens of hours of recordings he had secretly made of Francisco Correa, leader of the Gürtel plot, in which some of his illegal activities were revealed. Correa had been his personal friend, but he ended up betraying him to discover the affair. These audios became the fundamental evidence of a case involving 37 defendants and this directly affected the internal structure of the PP. However, they did not avoid his conviction.
The Supreme Court judges who upheld the National Court’s decision described their collaboration as “essential” and admitted that their recordings had been “of great help” in clarifying the facts. But they maintained his sentence by considering as proven that he had collected almost 40,000 euros in bribes and that he had helped Correa to keep the judgments of Majadahonda under control, where he started as a civil servant and ended up as an advisor. That is, he initially participated in this corruption, although he later began to clandestinely record the members of the conspiracy.
Peñas was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison for the crimes of illicit association, corruption, falsification of documents, embezzlement, prevarication and falsification. He never went to prison, since the National Court suspended his entry into prison while serving the sentence. He did so based on two arguments. On the one hand, the fact that none of the prison sentences, taken separately, exceed two years. And, on the other hand, “the significant reparative effort” that he had made by depositing “significant sums into the court’s credit account” according to his economic capacity.
The government considers that this pardon “attempts to be consistent with the new rules for the protection of informants, from which Peñas could not benefit at the time since they did not exist.” “It is an incentive for those who denounce corruption and a warning to the corrupt: some will be more protected and others will be more exposed,” say government sources.
