THE National Court (AN) condemned seven years in prisonthe one who was vice-president and former Minister of Justice of the Community of Madrid in the first government of Hope Aguirre, Alfredo Pradafor the continuing offence of prevarication in medical competition with the continuing offence of embezzlement aggravated by 24 contracts for a total of 40 million euros in the construction of the failed Justice Campus project between 2005 and 2011.
In the judgment, the court sentenced four employees who were part of the management team of this project to three and a half years in prison for the same crime, because it considers them necessary collaborators: Isabelino Baths (technical general manager) Alicio of the Heras (financial director), Andres Gomez Gordo (Security Sector Director) and Félix José García de Castro (counseling attorney).
However, the National Court applies the following to all those convicted: mitigation of unjustified delays and absolves them of the crime of fraud against public administrations attributed to them by the accusations brought by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Community of Madrid.
A sixth defendant, Mariano Jose Sanz (technical deputy general manager), was acquitted by the court, on the understanding that a master’s degree he was receiving had been agreed as compensation for his dismissal.
The magistrates also establish that the former councilor Prada, Baños, De las Heras and Gómez Gordo must jointly compensate the Community of Madrid in the amount of 40,482,735.78 eurosand alternatively, failing the foregoing, García de Castro will be civilly liable for this amount.
“Illegitimate” money was paid
In the judgment, the court explains that the Campus de la Justicia and the defendants, all members of the hiring table, carried out an “intense hiring activity in which they ignored all economic forecasts,” They have given up on any cost study.They evaded administrative controls by bypassing the legal services of the Community of Madrid, violating current regulations and outsourcing practically all of the company’s activity, which had a very small number of employees to carry out this task.
“The contracts signed were moving further and further away from the corporate purpose and the construction of a city of justice was no longer the main objective“, adds the resolution, “to become a pretext or an excuse to celebrate all types of contracts whose purpose is more to make the Campus known than in the execution of the project itself”, including the order to the British architect Norman Foster to design several buildings in the complex.
In this sense, it is indicated that Alfredo Prada was the one who went to London to meet Foster and decided to hire him without any justification.
Irregular contracts, the National Court emphasizes, “contribute nothing to the corporate purpose for multiple reasons, such as: the absolute absence of relationship between the contracted activity and the execution of the project or due to its excessive cost which completely exceeds the economic capacity of the company, due to its uselessness in relation to the corporate purpose, due to its unsuitability for the development phase of the project.
For the magistrates, these contracts were far removed from the social vocation of the Campus and the price paid for it. “This is money that has been diverted from its legitimate purpose”since the construction of the complex “never became a reality and the excessive expenditure used for the procurement was one of the causes of the failure of the project.”
“Very serious”
Court rules that embezzlement caused by the project is “high gravity”since it is enough to consider that the contract signed with Foster & Partners and the payment to the consulting companies with which the studio worked cost the public treasury more than 13 million eurosto which must be added the costs of others 23 contracts continuedwhose sum reaches 40 million euros.
Such an amount, he emphasizes, constitutes a “extraordinary relevance” and has clearly undermined public service, recalling that the urbanization and construction of a complex that would house all the judicial seats of the capital have not been completed.
The magistrates emphasize that the “failure” project of former director Alfredo Prada was due in large part to “unlimited expenditures devoted to purposes that had little to do with the corporate purpose, superfluous or unnecessary expenditures in which a large amount of resources were used without any cost forecast.”
