The times of justice are slower than those of politics. More than a year after leaving the Barcelona government, a judge in the Catalan capital has filed one of the latest criminal proceedings promoted by the Comuns’ rivals in response to their differences with the administrative actions of the council led by Ada Colau.
In an order to which elDiario.es had access, the magistrate files the complaint filed by the real estate company Juninmo against the former mayor, the former housing councilor Lucía Martín and three civil servants excluding any type of “retaliation” from the advice to the related company to postpone the eviction of a vulnerable tenant.
Juninmo’s complaint, filed during the final months of Colau’s term in 2023, followed the path of transferring the disagreements that companies and political rivals had with the Comuns City Hall to criminal proceedings. Moreover, the real estate lawyer was the same one who had already filed a complaint against Colau on behalf of a vulture fund, in a case that ended with the first recognition by a magistrate that the former mayor had suffered a legal war from his adversaries.
The new complaint ended up in the court file, like the fifteen previous complaints filed by companies or parties during Colau’s mandate. In this new case, Juninmo requested 100,000 euros of security from the City Hall for “civil liability” without attributing in its complaint a single criminal action to Colau or Martín, whom the company denounced simply for the function they occupied.
The real estate company considered as an offense of coercion the fact that, after the postponement of the eviction of a vulnerable tenant with the intervention of the municipal housing service, the Town Hall opened two disciplinary proceedings against Juninmo: one for non- compliance with social rules rental obligation which imposed the Catalan anti-eviction regulations then in force, and another for a tourist apartment presumed illegal.
The real estate company even provided a report from a detective firm to question whether the tenant whose eviction was delayed was vulnerable, unusual evidence in a criminal proceeding. To reach their conclusion, the detectives relied solely on the study of the tenant’s social networks and on the fact that his brother “has, at first glance, a comfortable professional situation”.
Magistrate Eva Moltó completely ignores the detectives’ report and rules out any crime based on the documentation collected regarding the tenant’s eviction and the two municipal files opened in Juninmo.
Concerning the eviction, the judge recalls that the postponement was “agreed” between the property company and the tenant, without any “concrete action” being attributed to the municipal intervention service in situations of loss of housing and occupation. or his agents.
Regarding the case opened against Juninmo for alleged breach of the obligation that, as a large landlord, had to provide social rent to the vulnerable man he wanted to evict, the magistrate warns the real estate company that the municipal case was archived after considering that the tenant did not meet the requirements. In other words, the city council did not impose any sanctions on the company.
The second file also went nowhere when a “material error” was discovered during its processing: the reported tourist apartment did indeed operate without authorization, but it was not a house owned by Juninmo , but rather of a house located on the same property but with a different owner. . There was therefore no sanction.
In short, for the judge, it is “particularly difficult to speak of reprisals” on the part of the Town Hall against Juninmo. As neither the specific orders of Martín nor any intervention of the accused officials have been demonstrated in the files, the judge proceeds to archive the file.
