The prosecutor Tomás Herranz, who will be decorated by the Palma City Council with the Police Merit Cross with white badge During the plenary session of this Thursday, September 26, it happened, in the Cursach trial, held in 2022, to accuse the businessman of the Majorcan nightlife of up to 16 crimes against propose his full acquittalas it happened.
The 16 crimes against Cursach were drug trafficking, corruption of minors, membership in a criminal organization, bribery, extortion, threats, coercion, use of privileged information, delinquency against the public treasury, money laundering, influence peddling, falsification of documents, procedural fraud, provision of false documents during trials, illicit possession of weapons and crimes against workers’ rights.
What was one of the biggest macro causes of corruption – with more than four years of investigation – has almost magically turned into a merciful acquittal and a failure of justice. The Majorcan businessman and nightlife tycoon, whose surname gave his name to the case, and CEO of the Cursach Group, Barthélemy Sbert, They were acquitted after being the main accused.
During the trial, the prosecutor appointed by the city council focused more on questioning witnesses and dismantling the case than on getting to the bottom of things.
To all this, it must be added that the businessman was only tried for a tiny part of the sixteen offences he was accused of, with the aggravating circumstance that in the judicial investigation of the case, There have been complaints that have mysteriously disappeared from the courts left uninvestigated, and witnesses whose whereabouts are unknown and whose location has not been established.
After 36 sessions and five and a half months of trial before the First Section of the Provincial Court of the Balearic Islands, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the three private prosecutors withdrew all charges against Cursach and the dozen Local Police officers, and all were acquitted.
In a final session unprecedented in the judicial history of Spain, in an unprecedented spectacle of tears by the prosecutor Herranz when he presented his conclusions and under the applause of the main accused, Bartolomé Cursach left with ease after a trial where Not even one percent of the incidents have been investigated.This is why he was denounced by the private prosecutor’s office of businessmen in the Majorcan town of Magaluf.
Behind Cursach’s acquittal there is undoubtedly the disastrous initial investigation carried out by the prosecutor. Miguel Angel They will rise and the judge Manuel Penalvawho took the reins of the Cursach case, and were removed from the judiciary in 2018 after the latter was implicated for sending WhatsApp messages to a key witness. Penalva was removed from the judiciary in July 2021.
Just twelve days before the trial was due to begin in June 2022, the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office withdrew charges against seven of the 23 defendants in the proceedings and limited the charges to the actions of the local police in Palma and their possible links to Cursach. also waiving 54 witnesses.
After charging the businessman Subirse and Penalva with the crime of active continuous corruption and the crime of coercion, with the prosecution having requested eight and a half years in prison, the public prosecutor, led by Herranz and Carrau, reduced these sentences to years and a half in prison, which, apart from a monumental surprise, was a harbinger of the radical change that the case was going to take.
For example, in the case of the private prosecution of the Magaluf businessmen, most of the issues to be prosecuted were eliminated and prosecutors limited their charge to a very minor issue relating to some advertising hoardings and cooling towers.
All crimes of extortion, coercion, threats, bribery, criminal organization, beating of ticket holders and up to 16 possible original crimes have mysteriously disappeared from the summary becausein the opinion of prosecutors, were no longer in the room.
