Court of Auditors demands €2.8m bail from Mas and Mas-Colell and nearly €2m from Junqueras and Puigdemont
Court alleges aver €5.4m were unduly spent on Generalitat's foreign action
MadridThe Court of Auditors has communicated today to around forty former and current Catalan government officials the bonds they will have to pay over expenses incurred by Catalan foreign policy and diplomacy between 2011 and 2017. The report runs for a total of 504 pages, known as the provisional liquidation act, which closes the instruction and imposes a bond of over than €5.4m to address the procedure, since later it is expected that a trial will be held to decide what will be the final amount of the fine for their accounting responsibility.
The huge sums affect the governments of Artur Mas especially but also Carles Puigdemont's. In the case of the latter a €1.9m bail is demanded, as El País has advanced and ARA has confirmed. The same applies to former vice president Oriol Junqueras, while Mas and former minister Andreu Mas-Colell (who appears in the report under two different names) will have to pay over €2.8m.
The Government has already advanced that it will guarantee all the people who are currently part of the executive. The issue is also that the accused share joint responsibility. That is, between Mas and Mas-Colell they will have to make up the payment of €2.8m euros, while waiting for the Court of Auditors to release the final minutes of liquidation.
Between Tuesday and Wednesday the lawyers representing all those prosecuted by the Court of Auditors have time to present allegations. The court - which is not as such a court because it is not within part of the Judiciary - has given only three hours to the legal representatives to read the 504 pages of the report and then only 10 minutes to each of them, regardless of the number of people they represent, to present allegations, which for the lawyer and defendant Francesc Homs is "scandalous" and "illustrates perfectly" the role of this politicised instance - controlled by the PP, which is blocking its renewal.
In turn, Puigdemont's lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, has said at the entrance of the Court of Auditors that the whole case is a "joke" and that is why they will allege "lack of technical solvency in the report" and that it is invading the external competences of the Generalitat collected in the Statute of Autonomy.
