MadridValència (EFE).- The former president of the Generalitat Francisco Camps returns this Monday to the National Court to be tried for the alleged irregular award to the Gürtel plot of the assembly of a Fitur exhibitor in 2009, after the court suspended the week past the start of the trial.
The president of the court that judges this piece of the macro-cause of corruption, the last one that affects Camps, chose to postpone the trial to avoid causing defenselessness to the defendants that would open the door to the nullity of the procedure.
All this because some defenses had not been able to access part of the documentation of the case, such as a document presented by the Generalitat just a few days before the hearing in which it modified its provisional conclusions.
In this way, the former Valencian president will return to one of the last rows of the defendants’ dock, where he sat last week for barely twenty minutes that the day lasted, accused of the crimes of prevarication and fraud for which the Prosecutor’s Office is demanding a sentence of 2 and a half years in jail and 10 years of disqualification for him.
Camps insists on his innocence
Camps, who led the Valencian PP for nine years (2002-2011), insists on his intention to return to politics and has always fought the accusations of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor and has defended his innocence, stressing that he was exempted from the nine causes that were directed against him, one of them the so-called trial “of the suits”, from which he was acquitted but which led him to resign.
«Absolutely nothing ever happened, neither with Formula 1, nor with the visit of the Pope, nor with the construction of the circuit, nor with the Nóos case, nor with any type of friendship, which is something like from Prehistory. », he indicated minutes before the trial before the journalists who gathered last Monday at the gates of the National Court.
The former regional president assured that neither he nor the senior officials of his government who sit on the bench took “a single euro in their pocket” and charged harshly against the current president of the Valencian Generalitat, Ximo Puig, for persecuting him, he said, ” in a hysterical and brutal way.
Camps is accused of instructing the Gürtel subsidiary in Valencia, Orange Market, to be awarded the assembly of an exhibitor for the Community pavilion at the Fitur fair in 2009 for 366,529 euros.
Benchmates
Along with him, more than twenty defendants will be tried, including several former senior officials of his government, and also the considered ringleader of the network, Francisco Correa; his number two, Pablo Crespo, and the head of the companies in Valencia, Álvaro Pérez, the Bigotes.
These last three are part of the ten defendants who have acknowledged the facts after reaching an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office seeking reductions in their sentencing requests; So have former senior officials of the Generalitat such as Silvia Caballer, Vicente Farnós, Enrique Navarro or Enrique Bort.
Anticorruption maintains that Gürtel’s companies settled in the community in 2003 to “take advantage of the business opportunities offered” by Camps and “an advantageous position in the call for and award of public contracts.”
It also affirms that, in the case of Fitur 2009, the award was made to “satisfy” the plot due to the debt that Orange Market had with the PP for the organization of party events and that other defendants agreed with the former president so that “provide what is necessary for the contract” to be for that company.
