The Supreme Court essentially confirmed the judgment which financially condemned the People’s Party for the reform of its headquarters financed with opaque money from its “B fund”. The judges partially upheld some appeals and reduced the sentence of those responsible for the company that carried out the work to nine months in prison and reduced the sentence of the former treasurer of the PP, Luis Bárcenas, to eight months, in addition to a fine of 180,000 euros for the latter.
The penalty also reduces the fraudulent amount of the tax offense: the amount defrauded thus drops from 870,000 to 374,000 euros. The conviction of the People’s Party as subsidiary civil liability to take charge of evaded tax payments, in case the convicts did not do so, was not appealed to the Supreme Court, therefore “it is valid”, explains the court.
The sentence of the National Court imposed two years in prison on Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of the PP, for having paid more than a million euros to the unified company for the renovation of the party headquarters, at number 13 of the street Génova in Madrid. Money from parallel accounting and which was used to renovate seven floors of the building, cellars and garages between 2005 and 2010. All in black money, according to the judges: “Excluding invoicing and official accounting and not declared to the public treasury.
In addition to the former treasurer of the PP, those responsible for the company that carried out the reform were sentenced for tax fraud to two years and nine months in prison: the architect Gonzalo Urquijo and his partner Belén García. The PP was also condemned as a subsidiary civilly responsible for part of the tax fraud: the 123,669 euros that Unifica stopped paying in 2007 for Corporate Tax after having collected black money in party coffers and therefore without the knowledge of the tax authorities.
The governing bodies of the PP at the time, said the Court, did not exercise “adequate control” over the management of Bárcenas and their measures to avoid this type of situation were, at that time, non-existent. The party had to be financially responsible for this part of the fraud, adds the sentence now ratified by the Supreme Court, since Bárcenas acted “as director of the said political formation”.
Box B and the Bárcenas papers
This is not the first judgment which certifies the existence of a black piggy bank within the Popular Party, but it is the first which pronounces on the veracity of the parallel accounts kept by its treasurer: the “Bárcenas papers “. “Some exit notes or annotations have been corroborated with other evidence, leading us to conclude that the diaries record events that are partly real,” he says.
This resolution, now declared firm in substance, affirmed that Luis Bárcenas “managed the cash funds paid to the political formation of the Popular Party in the form of private donations through a parallel accounting – B accounting – whose income and expenses were not not recorded in official accounts. And Bárcenas’ documents, he added, “reflect events that have been proven to occur, such as transfers to official donation accounts, deliveries of money to certain people linked to the PP or payments for reform work.
Not everyone appealed this decision to the Supreme Court. Luis Bárcenas, for example, did not appeal his two-year prison sentence. The Popular Party, still led by Pablo Casado, presented before the Criminal Chamber allegations against Bárcenas’ conviction and its own, but withdrew them shortly after the arrival of Alberto Núñez Feijóo as party president.
This is not the first definitive judgment on the various ramifications of the Gürtel corruption case, an investigation opened more than 15 years ago before the National Court. An open affair around municipalities and public administrations controlled by the PP where the businessmen of the conspiracy led by Francisco Correa benefited from multimillion-dollar rewards in exchange for bribes and gifts to party politicians .
This is the seventh firm resolution of the Supreme Court that declares the symbiotic relationship between the PP and the corrupt conspiracy proven for years. The last one was issued late last year, when the top court confirmed that the match was financed by 200,000 euros from Gürtel in Boadilla del Monte, one of his strongholds in Madrid.
