The trial for the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant began this Monday with the presentation of preliminary issues, in which the defenses again requested that the procedure be annulled, again alleging formal issues regarding the appearance of the popular accusation that had already been rejected previously.
Next, the lawyer of the former president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, announced that his client was not going to respond to the lawyer of the prosecution nor to the representative of the Prosecutor's Office, who is intervening in the hearing. And it is that although she finally did not file charges, the prosecutor did ask for the opening of an oral trial and is present at the trial, where she can both ask questions to the defendants and witnesses and present her final conclusions when the trial ends.
"There is no trace of lack of respect or consideration to the Public Prosecutor's Office," defended San Ginés' lawyer, José María Calero, when announcing that his client was not going to respond to the prosecutor. According to the lawyer, the questions he was going to ask were "sufficient."
In this way, the former president was the only one of the three defendants who refused to answer the prosecutor. Both the former secretary of the Cabildo, Francisco Perdomo, and the former manager of the Insular Water Council, José Juan Hernández Duchemín, did. In their case, the only questions they did not answer were those of the lawyer of the popular accusation.
During the presentation of the preliminary issues, San Ginés' defense also requested that none of the professors who have been cited as experts testify, and who are scheduled to appear on Tuesday of next week.
In this regard, he referred to the sentence in the Noos case to argue that "a legal expert opinion has no place," that is, the appearance of an expert in law. "No matter how much of a professor he is, it seems like a lack of respect for him to come and explain the applicable law to you and me," the lawyer said, addressing the magistrate, even though he himself had asked for a professor to testify as an expert.
Specifically, Pedro San Ginés' defense had requested the statement of Manuel Rebollo Puig, who prepared a report paid with public funds from the Water Consortium. San Ginés commissioned that report when he was still president, and then presented it in his defense in this criminal case. However, at the beginning of the hearing, his defense proposed to waive his testimony if the prosecution agreed to waive theirs. And he also asked that several people who are cited as witnesses not testify, although the judge rejected all these requests and the hearing began as planned.
The only change that she has estimated has been at the request of the popular accusation, which had requested to correct the citation of several witnesses, who by mistake had been summoned as experts. Among them are two people who were charged during the investigation: the lawyer Ignacio Calatayud and the former manager of the Insular Water Consortium during the seizure, Domingo Pérez. Finally, both will testify as witnesses.
The Prosecutor's Office emphasizes that the crime "affects the very basics of the Rule of Law"
Regarding the preliminary issues in which they request the annulment of the proceedings, the magistrate has made it clear that they will be resolved when the sentence is issued. However, both the Court of Instruction and the Provincial Court had already ruled when San Ginés' defense raised the same thing in different appeals that were rejected before the trial. In essence, the defenses argue that who was appearing as a popular accusation in the case was the Podemos group in the Cabildo and not its former councilors as individuals, so it alleges that a valid accusation document has not been filed. And in parallel, it also alleges that a political group could never have appeared.
In this regard, the lawyer of the accusation has reiterated the same thing that the investigating judge responded in his day, that is, that beyond the fact that their status as councilors of Podemos was recorded, Carlos Meca and Pablo Ramírez appear in the case from the beginning as individuals. And the same has been raised in the trial by the prosecutor, who has asked that these preliminary issues of the defenses be rejected, just as she did when responding to the appeals filed in her day by San Ginés. In addition, she has denied that the accusation document was presented out of time, as San Ginés' defense also alleges to try to annul the case.
In her intervention, the prosecutor has also defended the legitimacy of the popular accusation to continue with the procedure even though the Prosecutor's Office has not filed charges. "The criterion of this Public Ministry, as well as of the Provincial Court when resolving the appeals, is that it should not be suspended. It is necessary to allow the assessment of the evidence in the act of the oral hearing, which will lead to a conviction or acquittal," she defended. In her case, at the end of the investigation she did conclude that there were "indications of a crime," but then there was the withdrawal of the private prosecution, exercised by Club Lanzarote, and later the de-imputation of Ignacio Calatayud, in an order issued by the controversial judge Salvador Alba, who was soon after convicted of serious crimes of corruption in the exercise of his office.
Thus, although she has recalled that she later asked for the dismissal because she understood that it was not possible to "sustain an accusation" and "obtain a conviction" -having been de-imputed the person identified as the "ideologue" of the seizure-, she has again defended that "there is no impediment to the opening of an oral trial at the sole request of the popular accusation in the present procedure." In this regard, on the one hand she has recalled that Club Lanzarote -which was the one who initiated this case, by filing a complaint as a victim of the investigated crime- withdrew from the procedure but did not request "the dismissal of the proceedings or their filing," merely showing "its lack of interest in what might happen."
That caused one of the crimes to lapse -that of coercion, for which San Ginés was also charged-, but the case continued for prevarication. In this regard, the prosecutor has recalled that although the "entity harmed by the facts object of the procedure" is no longer appearing, there are other "legal assets" to protect, in which the action of the popular accusation fits. And in this case, she has stressed that the investigated crime "affects the very basics of the Rule of Law," so she has defended that the "legitimation" to exercise the accusation "corresponds to the entire Spanish society" and therefore also to the two people who are exercising it in this case.
