"He did not embezzle for personal gain": the Public Prosecutor's Office defends amnesty for Puigdemont in the Supreme Court

MadridThe future of Carles Puigdemont is in the Supreme Court this Monday. The appeals court has held a public hearing to study whether or not to apply the amnesty to the former president and the former ministers Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, half a year after Judge Pablo Llarena I would definitely deny them The judge, in line with the majority opinion of the criminal court, applied the interpretation that allocating public money to the referendum was a way of enriching oneself personally, given that the promoters of the consultation stopped putting money out of their own pockets and saved money. In this way, he justified that they cannot be pardoned. The amnesty law excludes the possibility of applying it to people who, by diverting funds, obtained a "personal benefit of a patrimonial nature." The judge made the decision in July and She confirmed it two months later, when it overturned both the first appeal of the defendants and the one presented by the Public Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office.

The legal services of the State, in line with the public prosecutor, have defended applying the amnesty to the appellants. "The rule is clear," the Prosecutor's Office has supported, which considers it "surprising" to reach the "artificial" conclusion that they diverted public funds to promote the referendum of October 1, 2017 with the aim of obtaining personal enrichment, an assumption that the deputy prosecutor believes the Supreme Court "invents." Sánchez Conde also denied that funds from the European Union have been affected, another of the exceptions provided for by the rule, and stressed that the objective of 1-O was to "pressure" the Spanish government to open a negotiation.

"The interpretation made by the investigating judge contravenes the spirit and the letter of the amnesty law. I have no doubt that the legislator intended the application to all the facts and crimes related to the 1-O referendum, including those classified as embezzlement," defended the governor of Bo, Com. The lawyer accepted the dissenting vote of the judge of the criminal chamber Ana Ferrer, who contravened the majority opinion and defended that the rule be applied to those convicted of embezzlement in the trial of the Process - Oriol Junqueras, Dolors Bassa, Raül Romeva and Jordi Turull -. Ferrer will not participate in this decision on Puigdemont, Comín and Puig, since it is the judges Vicente Magro - former senator of the PP -, Eduardo de Porres and Susana Polo who make up the court that must make it.

"You only have to know how to read to know that the law is fully applicable to the case at hand," said Puig's lawyer, Jaume Alonso-Cuevillas, who denounced an "attempt to impose one's own will and ideology over the will of the legislator." However, the final decision will hardly be favorable to Puigdemont and the rest of the exiles. However, if they deny him amnesty again, they will have exhausted the path in the Supreme Court and will already have a clear path to go to the Constitutional Court (TC). The court of guarantees, in fact, already has admitted the first appeals for protection from Junqueras, Romeva and Bassa, convicted for 1-O, after the slamming of the door on the amnesty of judge Manuel Marchena.

The decision, in the hands of the TSJC

At the public hearing, whose date was advanced by the ARA, Boye has argued that the High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) is the one competent to rule on the amnesty, and not the Supreme Court. The lawyer maintains that the high court should pass the ball to the TSJC because Puigdemont was elected as a member of the Parliament and in Comín the Central Electoral Board (JEC) denied him the status of MEP. Boye defended this by arguing that the law makes a distinction between who is competent to lift the precautionary measures when the case is in the investigation phase, which would be the judge who had the procedure underway, and who must apply the amnesty, which would be the "competent judge". In the first case it is Llarena, but in the second it is the TSJC.

The defense of Marta Rovira, the former general secretary of ERC, also intervened in the hearing to refute the request of Vox, a popular accusation, not to apply the amnesty to the crime of disobedience for which she is being prosecuted. Her lawyer, Íñigo Iruín, also argued that the TSJC is competent in her case.

Vox points to illegal financing

Vox, on the other hand, defended that the amnesty should not be applied to any of them and made an interpretation of the facts that goes even further than that made by Llarena. The lawyer of the far-right party, Marta Castro, pointed to a possible illegal financing of the independence parties through embezzlement for 1-O. "How can we dissociate these facts from a possible illegal financing of the parties that have promoted these illicit ends?" she raised precisely on the same day that it was made public that the The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has opened an investigation for this crime against Santiago Abascal's party.