The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, has requested that the open case be filed for the subsidies that the council granted to social entities such as the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and, consequently, that the judge annul her ” hasty” citation as investigated scheduled for next March 4.
In a letter, advanced by The country and to which this newspaper has had access, the mayor’s defense bases her request to shelve the case on three pillars: the absence of crime in the aid that the Prosecutor’s Office already determined in July, the “absolute lack of rigor” of the lawsuit against Colau from the opaque Association for Transparency and Democratic Quality (ATCD) and, especially, the null intervention of the mayor in the subsidies.
Colau’s defense, exercised by lawyers Olga Tubau and Àlex Sola, stands out, as the ATCD’s complaint describes several grants “in a manner lacking in chronological and systematic order” without attributing to Colau “not a single act in the processing” of the helps. To prove it, the defense provides the judge with half a dozen reports from the municipal intervention that supported the payments.
In short, for the defense the complaint is directed against Colau instead of the people who could have had an “effective participation” in the processing of the aid, which means, in his opinion, opening a “prospective constitutionally prohibited” investigation against the mayor
The defense also recalls that the complaint focuses on subsidies that were already investigated by the Prosecutor’s Office and that the Public Ministry ruled out that they were criminal. The filing of the case in the Prosecutor’s Office, however, was ignored by the ATCD association in its complaint.
It is not the only forgetfulness of the ATCD that Colau’s defense rescues in his writing. The subsidies, in addition to the municipal intervention reports, are also audited through an external audit and another that specifically analyzes the justification and processing of each file. And then they pass the control of the Court and the Audit Office. “The mayor – emphasizes the defense – has no intervention in the processing or in the resolution proposal that the managing body of the subsidy carries out”.
The ATCD complaint focuses on Barcelona’s attempt to municipalize water, aid to guarantee the right to housing and subsidies for international cooperation. The document includes both subsidies and political criticism of the council for “advising” squatters, an extreme that the Justice has already ruled out by filing another complaint against the mayor.
The entity considers that the subsidies granted respond “to the personal and professional relationship” between the mayor and those responsible for the social entities, despite the fact that all of them already received funds during the mandate of Xavier Trias (CiU). Colau’s defense replies that, in addition to not providing evidence to this end, the ACDT makes it obvious that nothing prevents the council from subsidizing social entities even though the municipal government shares with them “political sensitivity towards the serious problems generated by poverty and lack of of housing”.
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