Melilla (EFE).- The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office will take over the investigation into the alleged vote-buying plot in the Melilla Assembly elections on May 28, after the State Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, has so decreed.
According to the decree, to which EFE has had access, a report from the National Police informed the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 2 of Melilla “the existence of solid evidence of vote buying with a view to the elections”, a “criminal operation” that began on April 4 with the call for elections.
Specifically, the investigations carried out by the Police reveal “the existence of a large-scale vote-buying operation, through which between 100 and 150 euros were paid to a significant number of citizens, altering the legally established mechanics of the absentee ballot”.
According to the decree, to which EFE has had access, a report from the National Police informed the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 2 of Melilla “the existence of solid evidence of vote buying with a view to the elections”, a “criminal operation” that began on April 4 with the call for elections.
large scale operation
Specifically, the investigations carried out by the Police reveal “the existence of a large-scale vote-buying operation, through which between 100 and 150 euros were paid to a significant number of citizens, altering the legally established mechanics of the absentee ballot”.
According to the investigations carried out, said operation would have been carried out “by several individuals related to or related to the Coalition for Melilla” (CPM), to which some of the 10 detainees belong in the police operation carried out last Tuesday in the autonomous city, between them, the then District councilor and candidate number 3, Mohamed Ahmed.
The decree of the State Attorney General’s Office indicates that these “affiliated or related individuals” with CPM “would form an organized structure, with prior and concerted planning.”
The financing of vote buying in Melilla
“The purchase of votes would also be financed with part of the funds obtained by companies and individuals related” to CPM “in public tenders, agreements, contracts and subsidies that would have been awarded during the last legislature in the Autonomous City,” he adds. the State Attorney General’s Office.
The facts could be constitutive of documentary falsification, prevarication, embezzlement and bribery, in addition to electoral crimes of the arts. 141 and 146.1 a) of LO 5/1985, of June 19, of the General Electoral Regime, “without prejudice to further qualification”, according to the police report.
The State Attorney General’s Office considers that it is “a case of special importance” incardinable in article 19.4 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecutor’s Office (EOMF), which allows the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office to assume the case.
Thus, it justifies that the facts suppose “a manifestation of delinquency or organized crime” and have seriousness and transcendence “from the social and political point of view” due to “the claim to alter the free expression of the popular will”, in addition to “the complexity of the investigations” that must be developed.