Thursday, March 28

The judge exculpates the former president of the Barcelona Provincial Council for the diversion of subsidies

The investigating judge has filed the two pieces of the case for the diversion of subsidies from the Barcelona Provincial Council in which the former president of the provincial corporation Salvador Esteve, from CiU, was charged, by ruling out “irregularities” in the granting of aid to entities related to the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC).

In two orders, the magistrate María Carmen Suárez, who replaces the head of the court, Joaquín Aguirre, agrees to dismiss the two pieces that affected Esteve, which focused on alleged irregularities in the granting of aid from the Barcelona Provincial Council for projects of cooperation in the Maghreb and in Costa Rica.

Esteve was arrested in May 2018 in the framework of a case on the alleged diversion of cooperation funds from the Barcelona Provincial Council to entities related to the CDC. The case has run out of steam and of the ten open pieces to date, only the one that affects the Igman and Catmón foundations remains, in which the former head of international relations at CDC Víctor Terradellas is being investigated.

It was the information obtained from the records of Terradellas in the case of the Diputación that allowed the investigators to pull the thread and open the Volhov macro-cause, which investigates the alleged diversion of funds under the protection of the procés and the corruption of members of the so-called ‘General Staff ‘ who organized the referendum thanks to his influence in the Generalitat.

At the end of last year, Judge Aguirre already filed the pieces of the case of the Diputación regarding alleged diversion of funds to the entities Educational Platform and Utopia, Ecosde, Strategic and Kosector, to which are now added the two that affect Esteve . In her case, the judge concludes that the investigation and the statements of witnesses and defendants reveal the “non-existence of pressure to inform in favor of the award of controversial public contracts.”

This circumstance, in the opinion of the magistrate, “comes to exclude the existence of irregularities” in the granting of the investigated subsidies. Neither the Prosecutor’s Office nor the private prosecution exercised by the Barcelona Provincial Council in the pieces in which Esteve was involved opposed his filing.



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