The owner of the Court of Instruction number 15 of Valencia issued an order in which he rejects five appeals presented by the defense and confirms the proceedings against the former vice-president of the Generalitat and leader of Compromís, Mónica Oltra, and other former senior officials of this department.
They are accused of alleged cover-up of sexual abuse of a minor under guardianship by Oltra’s ex-husbandwho was a social educator at the victim support center.
This is what the judge agreed in an order issued this Thursday and collected by Europe Press. The magistrate, in his writings, endorses the reasoning of the prosecution.
The latter, in its report, concluded that, since all the people now prosecuted had been the subject of an “investigation for their participation, more or less, in one way or another, in the two episodes in which THE Audience supports the existence of evidence of an offense justifying the continuation of the case, what the applicants claim – a repetition of the already agreed and revoked dismissal – appears to be a procedural impossibility“.
The decision is as expected. As this newspaper reported, the reopening of the trial against Oltra and 15 others due to administrative negligence suffered by the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of her ex-husband had only one possible outcome: the oral trial. This is what was warned by the order of the Fourth Section of the Valencia Courtwhich suggested that “it must be the act of the oral trial where it is elucidated”.
After this resolution, the only scenario that would allow the former Valencian vice-president to sit on the bench was the withdrawal of all accusations, and representation of sexual abuse victim, as well as private accusations, have maintained their accusations.
Given the decision of the Valencia Court, Judge Vicente Ríos, as the judicial sources consulted explained to EL ESPAÑOL, had little room for maneuver and “by legal imperative”, as he himself emphasized in his order, he had to continue the procedure and issue an indictment. order.
The Court partially allowed the appeals of the three charges because it understood that it could not “be clearly excluded“the existence of a criminal offense and that, therefore, there is sufficient evidence to prosecute the persons under investigation.
The decision to reopen the case came against the criteria of the prosecution, which supported the decision of Judge Ríos to archive the case opened against the leader of Commitments for the alleged concealment of the case of sexual abuse of the minor by Luis Eduardo Ramirez Icardiwho meets 5 years in prison for these facts.
Last May, the Prosecutor’s Office corrected its initial criteria and rejected the appeals presented by the prosecution against the closure of the case granted by the court. The position of the prosecutor’s office and the judge spoke of a possible final case, due to which Oltra resigned from all his positions in June 2022, and Compromís proposed his return to the front line.
The accusations
The sexual abuse of the minor was committed when the leader of Compromís was at the head of Egalité, the conselleria responsible for minors in custody. The girl accused Oltra of hiding her affair after the leader of the far-right group España 2000, Jose Luis Robertooffered to defend her.
The prosecution requested in 2022 the imposition of Oltra for the alleged crimes of prevarication, abandonment of minors and omission of the duty of assistance. But in the latest report submitted to the court in early May, the public prosecutor He did not observe any signs of criminality in any of the people investigated..
Judge Ríos, who in 2022 also requested the indictment of Oltra, considering his interrogation in court for these events inevitable, finally accepted April 2 the provisional dismissal of the case.
But the Court then pushed the judge to begin the process that would ultimately bring Oltra to justice despite his opposition. This is a more or less common situation in court and has also happened in other proceedings with enormous media impact.
This was, for example, the case of the Valencia metro tragedy, in which 43 people died and 47 others were injured. The judge Nieves Molina He filed the case and, against his judgment, the Valencia court ordered its reopening and trial.
