Madrid (EFE) Francisco Camps, who has been referred to as a “baron of strength in the PP” who could lead the plot “to rise” and get the volume of contracts he had had in Madrid.
“Mr. (Francisco) Correa told me that they are going to Valencia because (Álvaro Pérez) has made friends with Mr. Camps,” Peñas asserted in the National Court trial of almost thirty defendants for alleged irregular adjudications to Gurtel. Among them is Camps, who is facing a request for two and a half years in prison.
The former mayor of Majadahonda (Madrid) who denounced Gürtel with his recordings has testified that he was told that the plot was installed in Valencia in 2004, when the relationship with the national PP was no longer “as before” and the network was getting fewer contracts, due to the “personal friendship” that El Bigotes, one of the main convicts, had with former president Camps. The network, he has said, has not stopped working since then.
Contacts “from top to bottom” starting from Camps
Camps was an “important president” who “could lead them to rise to where they were before,” indicated Peñas, who reiterated that the contacts between the plot and politicians “occurred in a cascade, from top to bottom.” In the Valencian Community, he recalled, it was “President Camps” who was higher up and “all the necessary contacts came from there.”
He explained that there came a time, with José María Aznar in La Moncloa, when “all” the regional presidents “wanted to do things with Mr. Correa” because “many” were “interested” in that the companies that organized events for the president of the Government, they also did it for the “community on duty”.
Convicted of a piece of the case and pending a pardon petition that has favorable reports, Peñas has claimed to have “personal knowledge” that Correa “had access to the Generalitat” as “he had in Madrid” and that the network “worked exactly the same” in all the places where it was implemented, although it has said that it does not know the details of each contract that is being judged.
The company transfers “the way of working”
“What the company transfers is not only a new headquarters, but also the way of working in Madrid, Jerez, Castilla-La Mancha, Castilla y León. He transfers it to Valencia ”, he has affirmed.
He also alluded to a trip to Rome, where he said that El Bigotes and Camps met, to close the organization of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Valencia in 2006, a matter in which, he specified, the former president needed “someone trusted to coordinate everything (…). And for that there was Álvaro”.
With a “simple” recording device hidden in the inside pocket of his jacket, Peñas recorded for two years, “with great fear”, a multitude of meetings with members of the plot; files that she attached to the 2007 complaint that gave rise to the case.
Gürtel’s whistleblower implicates Camps
This Wednesday he has recounted the “modus operandi” of the plot, which sought to obtain “all kinds of contracts”, “yes or yes, in one way or another”, sometimes “because they had direct access to the politician in question” or through the intermediation of businessmen.
Correa’s companies managed to carry out “all the campaigns of the national PP” with Aznar and, “from there a series of cascading contracts are produced”, also in public administrations, he has continued.
The court has also heard two convicted of another branch of the case who worked for the Correa Group, Alicia Mínguez and the former advisor to the Madrid City Council José Javier Nombela, who have acknowledged the rumors that were going around the office about the relationship of El Bigotes with charges of the Generalitat Valenciana, including Camps.