This Friday, the Astapa affair was reduced to something quite small, in any case nothing comparable to what we once thought. None of the 15 convicted in a total of 103 investigated cases will go to prison and the fines, in total, barely reach four million euros. There are 31 acquitted. Antonio Barrientos, then mayor of Estepona (PSOE) was sentenced to five months of suspension from his employment or public function and a fine of 40,000 euros for the continuing offense of passive corruption. In other words, for having received a “gift, which we will see in the sentence what it refers to,” he told the outlet.
More than 16 years after police raided the town hall following the trail of what was believed to be an urban corruption plot similar to the scandal already ravaging Jesús Gil’s Marbella, the problem has been resolved (at shelter of possible resources) with the reading of the judgment. We will have to wait a few days to know the details of the sentence, which is more than 3,000 pages long.
“It became clear that it was an aberration and an atrocity”, something “indecent”, Barrientos commented at the exit. He always defended his innocence. The sentence is only a fraction of what he was previously sentenced to, but he explained that he was not happy because he had been convicted and would appeal. “The first impression of the sentence is that there is nothing that was reported,” he said, also attacking the prosecution. “I could put my foot there, but I never put my hand there,” he had already declared.
Minor convictions
The reading of the third section of the Malaga Provincial Court confirmed what was already suspected: during these two years, it has not been proven that the corruption plot around the Estepona town hall was scale initially anticipated and which the prosecutor also noted in his indictment, from 2018. Moreover, the delays deflated it even more. The court has been trying this case for a year and ten months after 15 years of investigation and applied the very nuanced mitigating circumstance of excessive delay to all defendants.
Only eight of the 37 were sentenced to prison terms, of one month and fifteen days in most cases. Six will be replaced by a fine. Those who receive the heaviest sentence, José Ignacio Crespo and Juan Jesús López, are sentenced to six and five months in prison, sentences which, being less than two and a half years, will most likely be suspended.
Last July, when he was to be sentenced, all the accused saw the prosecutor drastically reduce their requests for conviction after more than a year in the dock. Initially, the prosecution requested 205 years in prison and the payment of 184 million euros in bail between all the accused in its indictment, signed in 2018. When the trial arrived, it required more than two and a half years in prison, the limit below which the sentence is usually suspended, for 33 defendants. When he finished, he only held that bar for two. And the sentence left it at zero.
The fines also do not stand up to comparison with the figures used. There are five sentences which include a lump sum of 728,789.84 euros, but the majority are ordered to pay 450 euros.
A trial marked by the shadow of Villarejo at the origin of the case
It has been 17 years since the UDEF began investigating suspected urban corruption in Estepona, a neighboring municipality to Marbella, and more than 16 years since police officers burst into the town hall with a court order and took away papers and made dozens of arrests, among others. them the mayor at the time, Antonio Barrientos. Before learning of the judgment, the former advisor described the process as “inhumane” and an “ordeal” for him and his family. “A justice system that operates with these parameters is no longer justice. Who gives us back the past?
The Astapa affair, which in its initial phase was compared to Malaysia because of the number of accused (more than a hundred), the money that was allegedly embezzled (the prosecution even requested 284 million euros in bail in his first indictment) and the documentary volume (351,114 pages in 774 volumes -128 main documents and 646 documentary documents-), has deflated over the years and, particularly, since the trial began, in January 2023.
On July 29, during the sentencing hearing, the prosecution reduced its charge to 37 people from the fifty people it had started accusing almost two years ago. The penalties he sought had also been significantly reduced for everyone. Only two of them face more than two and a half years in prison, a limit below which the courts generally suspend their sentences in the absence of a criminal record. For Barrientos, he requested two years in prison and a fine of 40,000 euros. At the start of the trial, he requested ten years and nine months and a million fine, in addition to 28 million in civil liability. There is no longer any civil liability, as Estepona City Hall withdrew from the process at the start of the trial.
The alleged involvement of retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo distorted the trial, sometimes focusing on his personality (although he was not accused) and ended up lowering the expectation of conviction from the first hour, when the magistrates canceled the wiretaps, calling into question the origin of the case. Doubts lay in the reporting of the agreements that constituted the core of Astapa, which turned out to be mere “papers” with no known author, signature or date. A document that did not contain any “minimal serious” indication and which served to launch the file as support for a complaint filed with the UDEF of Madrid, led by José Luis Olivera, linked to Villarejo.
Once the operation was launched, the controversial commissioner, with town planning interests in Estepona, managed to place a trusted person in charge of town planning, to whom he gave instructions which were reflected in his records and his diary.
Several years later, a ruling put Estepona on the map for alleged urban corruption.
