The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court has acquitted the senator of Coalición Canaria Pedro Manuel Sanginés Gutiérrez of the crimes of false accusation and complaint, and of false testimony, for which he was tried in the high court last March 12. The court concludes that the proven facts do not constitute the crimes for which the senator was accused.
The statement of facts records that in November 2009, weeks after Sanginés took office as president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, and consequently of the Public Local Enterprise Entity-Art, Culture and Tourism Centers (EPEL-CACT), he filed a complaint for possible irregular hirings in said entity, where he pointed to its CEO as a possible responsible party and, subsequently, to a specific businessman.
Six months later, the public entity CACT of Lanzarote was constituted as a plaintiff in the very terms of the complaint of irregularities. All those actions determined the initiation of proceedings in a Court of Arrecife, which extended until November 2019, when they were archived.
According to the sentence, both the Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution representing the family of said businessman (already deceased) considered that the complaint did not correspond to reality but was simply a political persecution by Sanginés against his predecessor, while the senator's defense maintained that, upon learning of possible irregularities in contracting by the public center, it was his legal obligation to inform, first the Civil Guard and then the Court, of alleged criminal acts.
The Supreme Court explains that the crime of false accusation can only be attributed with intent, and only when it is proven or reasonably inferred that the subject carried out their accusation or complaint with malice, that is, with knowledge of the falsity or with manifest disregard for the truth. That is to say, what has been studied is whether the accused, with knowledge of its falsity, brought to the attention of the Civil Guard and the Court certain facts to harm specific persons.
The court reaches an acquittal conclusion and highlights that the accused acted within the framework of a complaint he filed for alleged irregularities in the administrative contracting process carried out within the local public enterprise entity EPEL, this body being the one that files the corresponding criminal complaint narrating the facts and that could be constitutive of one or several crimes.
He adds that his action also did not constitute objective falsehood and deliberate intention to lie when he formalized the indictment against the businessman and his company, inasmuch as he limited himself to bringing to the attention of the authorities some facts that had been transmitted to him that could be constitutive of a crime, and not even personally but in his capacity as a director of the public entity in the concept in which it is reported.
The resolution underlines that it was the public entity that filed a complaint in the year 2010 in the same terms as those exposed by him, it not being recorded that the accused participated in it or in its subsequent expansion.
The court indicates that, there being no crime of false accusation, the imputation for false testimony correlatively falls, since both behaviors are –in most cases– the result of the same design to willfully lie in the imputation of apparently criminal acts.
The high court indicates that the understandable unease and discouragement suffered by the businessman reported for an investigation that lasted ten years (what the judges describe as “an example of what should not be” the proper functioning of the courts), does not mean that whoever merely brought to the attention of Justice some facts that they suspected could be constitutive of some criminal offenses should be criminally convicted.