Pedro de Armas is right when he says that in recent days many lies have been told about the criminal case investigating him for alleged money laundering. In fact, he has told the biggest ones himself, with some external help. However, he has not been able to deny a single comma of what was published by La Voz de Lanzarote, which was the one who uncovered the news about this investigation.
Obviously, as an investigated party, Pedro de Armas is within his right to question the conclusions of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (Udef) of the National Police, the Public Prosecutor's Office and even the Provincial Court of Las Palmas. The strange thing would be the opposite. Can you imagine an investigated or accused person saying: "Yes, yes, I took it all"?
But one thing is his right to defend himself and another is the minimum respect that the truth and objective facts deserve. And seeing how he distorts an order of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas, manipulating its content, should make the hair stand on end of any citizen who minimally knows what happened.
And what happened is that the Court has ordered to continue investigating, because it sees indications for it. But it seems that Mr. De Armas and his people have only read one paragraph of that seven-page order. In that paragraph, what is done is to reproduce a conclusion that is not from the Court, as the affected party has tried to make it appear, but from the current judge of the Court of Instruction Number 3 of Arrecife, who agreed to the provisional dismissal of the proceedings against De Armas.
Obviously, although that decision has already been annulled by the Provincial Court, it is logical that Pedro de Armas now clings to that order of the investigating judge. Any investigated party would do so, and would rub his hands together to see that the judge includes several phrases questioning the case being followed in his own Court, even calling it "inquisitorial", "generalist", "proscribed by the Constitution" and "opened for belonging to the same political party as José Francisco Reyes".
If you were Princess Cristina, to give an example, what would you stick with: the indictment of Judge Castro, or the appeal of Prosecutor Horrach defending her innocence? Well, in this case, where alleged money laundering crimes are also being investigated, a very similar discrepancy has been experienced, also with harsh crossed responses in the writings of the judge and the Prosecutor's Office. However, here there is a big difference. Here it is the Prosecutor's Office that considers that there are more than enough indications of criminality to continue investigating, and has also found support from the Provincial Court, which considers exactly the same.
In this case, the one who thinks otherwise is a judge who has not even instructed this case from the beginning. In fact, he arrived at the Court at the end of June 2013, when the investigation had already been open for a year and a half, supported and endorsed with its corresponding orders by the other two judges who had passed through that Court during that time. A little more than a month after arriving and finding that case open, the new judge gave the Police seven days to send him a report of what had been investigated up to that moment, and four days after receiving it he closed the case.
So, as respectable as it may be, it is the criterion of a judge who had just arrived at the Court (after spending several years outside the judiciary, practicing as a lawyer), compared to that of the two judges who preceded him in office, that of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit of the National Police, that of the Public Prosecutor's Office and that of the Provincial Court.
In fact, the latter even suggests that before making the decision to dismiss the proceedings, the judge did not even "examine" or incorporate into the case documentation that had been collected during the investigation. And it also shows its "surprise" because the judge makes those statements and then agrees to the "provisional" dismissal, which in itself implies that "the indications" that led to the opening of a criminal case "still exist".
In addition, he stresses that the investigation "is not even close to being exhausted", and that many data are still missing. Some data that do not only pass through the rogatory commission sent to Argentina, as Pedro de Armas has been saying, but in several more, including the detailed analysis of the 66 current accounts that have been detected in the investigation of his assets.
And all this, logically, is overlooked by Pedro de Armas. And it is not surprising that he does so. What is surprising is that he offends the intelligence of the citizens, insisting on the hackneyed discourse that he is the victim of a political and planetary persecution, as if a specialized Unit of the National Police, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Provincial Court of Las Palmas were dedicated to "persecuting" councilors (in his case, by the way, from a party with a single councilor and in the opposition, in a town hall of just over 55,000 inhabitants).
Apparently, for De Armas the problem is not that he is being investigated by the police and by the Justice, but that the citizens have found out. As if it were normal for the media not to report on these things (or at least not when they happen to him).
However, regardless of how this criminal case ends, and whether or not Pedro de Armas is convicted of these acts, the concrete thing is that the investigation has already put on the table a lot of data that is good for society to know.
Here we are not even talking about someone being accused of murder and then being found innocent, with the logical damage that this may cause to the affected party. We are talking about objective facts (which make citizens suspect and make the police and the Justice suspect), regardless of whether it is determined or proven that they are criminal or not.
We are talking about someone who has amassed a fortune for years, to the point of earning 800,000 euros in a single day, in a single morning and without leaving the notary's office (something that, by the way, he himself has not denied), dedicating himself to buying and selling land (that is, to urban speculation) while holding positions linked to urban planning and while having a political, personal and business relationship with the former mayor of Yaiza, who granted licenses where he previously denied them, after Pedro de Armas' name appeared in that operation. And that those licenses that he granted him, and that logically change the value of a land, were also illegal.
Therefore, regardless of what ends up happening in the Courts, that information alone is already extremely relevant (in fact, just for revealing it, the work that the Udef, the prosecutor and the two previous judges have done already deserves recognition). This is how many media outlets outside the island, both regional and national, have understood it, and have echoed these data. And of course, this is how the majority of citizens understand it, who, with luck, if they are "mileuristas", would need about 20,000 days of honest work (that is, more than 60 years) to earn 800,000 euros.
Those citizens, regardless of what happens tomorrow with this case in the courts, have the right to issue their own judgment and to know what their public representatives do and what they do. Because one thing is the judicial system, in which logic is not enough to dictate sentences, and another is the conscience of a society that must have its own list of demands. A society to which some try to convey that as long as one does not have at least two or three convictions for a dozen crimes, nothing happens here, as if morality, ethics and decency did not count.
