Thursday, March 28

The judge now accepts that the Government charges in the case of 3% of Convergència


The judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz has corrected his initial criteria and has admitted the appearance of the Generalitat de Catalunya as a private prosecution in the separate piece of the 3% case in which the alleged illegal financing of Convergencia Democràtica de Catalunya is investigated ( CDC) through the audiovisual production company Triacom.

The production company Triacom inflated more than 50% the price of the programs that it invoiced to TV3

Know more

In an order, the judge accepts the appeal of the Generalitat and revokes his initial refusal to allow the appearance of the Government in the case due to the presence in the Catalan Executive of Junts, heir party to Convergència. The judge now considers that the Generalitat could be considered harmed given that one of the legs of the investigation is the overpricing in the invoices that Triacom turned over to the Catalan public media company, including TV3, financed in part with public money.

As revealed by elDiario.es, the production company Triacom inflated the price of the programs it invoiced to TV3 by more than 50%. The investigators of the 3% case maintain that the amounts that Catalan television overpaid were later used to issue false invoices issued by companies related to Convergència and its leaders.

Specifically, the investigators are focused on the alleged illegal financing of the CDC through the electoral campaign of Artur Mas in 2010. The investigations begin with the first contracts of 2009 and extend throughout the presidency of Mas, who placed Brauli Duart at the head of the public media company. In that period the overprice with Triacom reached 60%. The corrupt scheme of the 3% audiovisual would be the same that was already proven by the Justice in the Palau case, in which a businessman confessed that he gave the Palau de la Música false invoices worth 824,299 euros for services that were actually provided to the party in the 2004 general election campaign.

In line with the last position expressed by the Prosecutor’s Office, Judge Pedraz admits the institution’s appearance, pointing out that, in the event that it is constituted as an accusing party, the Generalitat must help to investigate if, in effect, “Triacom sold its programs to TV3 well above production costs”. And regarding the inclusion in the Government of the Generalitat of members who inherit the actions of the PDeCAT and CDC political parties, the judge points out, “the truth is that the commitment to unitary action, as the constitutional body that it is, of the Generalitat , must be taken into account as its constitution is preferred as part of the distrust of its intentions”.

The Triacom piece is one of the lines of investigation of the case where Pedraz tries to elucidate whether senior CDC officials, in collusion with officials and businessmen, “set up a structure to illegally finance this political party in a covert manner.” To do this, according to the judicial report, “they altered all kinds of public tenders in order to ‘direct’ them towards the companies of conniving businessmen who, in turn, made ‘donations’ to foundations linked to the CDC.”

The previous head of said court, José de la Mata, pointed out in 2019 that Triacom could be involved in the alleged illegal financing of CDC, although with a different operation. The “uniqueness” of him would lie in the fact that, instead of making donations to foundations, he would pay debts contracted by the Catalan party with other companies, justifying it with false invoices.

Specifically, he explained that he would have settled a debt contracted with CDC with the company Hispart, specialized in audiovisual production, for the 2010 electoral campaign. The amount paid by Triacom for this concept would have been about 750,000 euros. De la Mata then warned that Triacom would also have been used to pay private expenses of people directly or indirectly linked to the CDC, among whom he mentioned the former president of the Diputación de Lleida Joan Reñé or the wife of Oriol Pujol Ferrusola, one of the sons of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol.



www.eldiario.es