The judge in the DANA case summons the owner of El Ventorro to testify and tightens the net around Mazón.

ValenciaThe judge presiding over the DANA case, Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, summoned as witnesses the inner circle of the now-former acting president of the Valencian Community, Carlos Mazón; his likely successor, the parliamentary spokesperson and party secretary general, Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca; and the owner of the El Ventorro restaurant. Besides Llorca, those who will have to testify before the judge include the regional secretary of the Presidency of the Generalitat, Cayetano García; the regional secretary of the president's cabinet, José Manuel Cuenca; the director general of Communication and Institutional Promotion, Francisco González Pérez; the director general of the press office of the Presidency, María Teresa Gómez Noguera; and advisor Josep Lanuza – the latter two accompanied Mazón to the Cecopio (the regional government's emergency management center). The judge believes the statements can help clarify the content of the calls made by the former Minister of Justice and the Interior, given that they all spoke with Salomé Pradas and Mazón throughout the 29th, and also to ascertain "the information available to each of the members of the Cecopi meeting." She also wants to know the impact these conversations may have had "on erroneous decision-making or the omission of necessary decisions that could have prevented the terrible personal injuries under investigation." The summons for the owner of the El Ventorro restaurant was issued on the same day it was revealed that the head of the Valencian government, while having lunch with journalist Maribel Vilaplana, signed a list of elite athletes from the Valencian Community. The information was released by the Valencian government after the journalist stated on Monday during her testimony that during lunch, the restaurant owner handed Mazón an envelope containing documents, which he signed and then returned to the owner. Sources within the Valencian government have confirmed that it was a list of athletes after the private prosecution brought by Acció Cultural del País Valencià (ACPV) on Tuesday asked the judge to investigate which documents the president had signed. The organization questioned the urgency of the matter. Sources within the Valencian government explained today that the Directorate General of Sport requested the urgent signing of the third partial list of elite athletes for 2024, given that the list had been published earlier that day incomplete due to an error. The same sources emphasize that the signing was urgent because the deadline for students who are also elite athletes to request exemption from physical education or validation of the subject expires on October 31st of each year.

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This Wednesday, it was also made public that ACPV (Acció Cultural del País Valencià) requested the judge to require the Generalitat (Valencian regional government) to provide the contract it has with two companies that compile a press summary of all opinions and news reports about Carlos Mazón published in newspapers, radio, and television, and generate alerts no later than five minutes after they are broadcast. Acció Cultural del País Valencià is demanding to know what devices receive these alerts and who receives them. It also wants to know if high-ranking officials from the Department of the Presidency and the Ministry of Justice and the Interior, formerly headed by Salomé Pradas, are included, and whether they received alerts on the day of the DANA (isolated high-altitude depression) and the day before.

The aim of this petition is to discover whether government officials were aware of all the news reports published by the media during that fateful day, which detailed the floods that affected a large part of the Valencia region from early morning and how they progressively worsened from 1 p.m. onwards until becoming catastrophic.