The Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of Judge Salvador Alba for serious corruption crimes in the exercise of his office, thus upholding the ruling issued in September 2019 by the TSJC. The ruling considers it proven that Alba incurred in crimes of prevarication, bribery and document forgery, to try to harm the also magistrate Victoria Rosell.
The ruling, against which no appeals are possible, imposes a sentence of six and a half years in prison and also implies his disqualification as a magistrate. Specifically, it imposes 18 years of special disqualification for the position of judge, "with definitive loss of the position he holds." In addition, he must pay a fine of 12,000 euros and compensate Victoria Rosell with 60,000 euros.
The magistrate, who after the opening of the oral trial was already removed from his duties, was part of the Sixth Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas, and from there he intervened in some of the main corruption cases opened in Lanzarote. Among other things, Alba authorized the reopening of the Stratvs winery and annulled key evidence in the Unión case, which led to the closure of several open lines of investigation, which further harmed the confessed convict Luis Lleó and involved members of the judiciary.
In addition, he was also the rapporteur of the order by which Ignacio Calatayud was left out of the case for the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant. His dismissal was key for the Prosecutor's Office to finally not formulate an accusation against the rest, "given the impossibility of formulating an accusation against who, according to the other defendants, was the ideologue of the operation."
The Supreme Court's ruling rejects the appeal filed by Salvador Alba against the first ruling, but also that of the private prosecution, exercised by Victoria Rosell, who requested that the penalties be increased.
Being already investigated in this case and before being removed from his position, Alba had to decide on the validity of the first recording of the Unión case, when Luis Lleó tried to bribe the then councilor Carlos Espino through Fernando Becerra. Salvador Alba himself was facing incriminating recordings against him at that time - provided by the businessman with whom he tried to conspire against Rosell - but even so he was the rapporteur of that appeal.
In his resolution, Salvador Alba annulled that recording stating that Espino violated "the expectation of intimacy" of Becerra and Lleó by offering the bribe. "It is evident that Don Fernando Becerra would have behaved very differently if he knew that Don Carlos Espino had already gone to the Police premises days before, where they had provided him with a recorder," the order stated, which was later annulled by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands.
However, other controversial decisions adopted by the magistrate in this and other cases could not be appealed and decisively influenced some procedures.
