Anyone who is minimally informed about law and politics cannot but be surprised by the excessive demand made by the Catalan High Court (TSJC) prosecutor, who is seeking a sentence of six years in prison and fifteen being banned from office holding, as penalties for document falsification and abuse of authority, for the suspended speaker of the Catalan Parliament, Laura Borràs. During eight long sessions at the TSJC we have seen witnesses, experts and defendants parade through; we have heard exculpatory statements from the various Catalan culture ministers, with whom she worked as director of the Institute of Catalan Letters; also statements incriminating her, from an employee of the cultural institution, who in an assertive tone told the court that she had repeatedly alerted her boss to irregularities in the contracts; and the confirmation of the deal done between two defendants and the public prosecutors, which made it very difficult for Borràs.
The testimonies of Isaías Herrero and Andreu Pujol, the two defendants who saw the length of the sentence demanded for them reduced after they changed their statements, were the basis of the prosecution narrative and helped ensure that all eyes were on the suspended speaker of Parliament: "We agreed to present several contracts; one good one and two dummies", stated Herrero, making it more difficult for her to defend herself against the charge of splitting contracts during the period when she led the Institute of Catalan Letters, between 2013 and 2017. In total, Borràs allegedly awarded 18 contracts to Herrero worth 335,000 euros, to update the Institute's website. Work that was completed and at market rates.
Soon, the TSJC will issue its verdict, with very little chance that it will be one of acquittal. We cannot expect a total change with respect to the prosecutor's demand; during the trial, if anything has been visible, it is that the sensation of the defendant's guilt on the part of the court was very strong. Since one should not be naive, it can be expected that the administrative errors that have occurred, if the court considers it so, will have a penalty several degrees higher than if it were a public office of less political weight and of a different ideology. Although there is no deadline for the sentence to be made public - as a non-fixed criterion, it is usually takes about a month - the speed of the judgment given by the court presided over by the TSJC's highest ranking official, Jesús María Barrientos, will be important.
Not just the sentence to be given, but also the time taken to decide it, will make a difference to the proposition of teaching a lesson to a pro-independence leader. In fact, Borràs, in her final plea, reiterated that she had been criminalized in order to harm her personally and politically. If the sentence were to become known at a speediness unusual for the TSJC and was released before Sunday, March 12th, Borràs would not have reached two years as speaker of Parliament and would lose some of the economic prerogatives of the position, both in the present - the salary of a legislature - and the future - a pension from the age of 65 - which are included in the Statute of Catalonia and in the laws and regulations based on it that were drawn up later.
Although Together for Catalonia (Junts) has attempted to maintain a tight seal on the debate over the party's different options to replace Borràs in the positions of speaker of the house and party president if she is convicted, it is obvious that if it were so, a relief in the former position would be forced even if Jordi Turull didn't want it to happen. There would be a new vote for the second most important institutional position in Catalonia and it would be best for it to be determined by agreement, given the fragmentation of the Catalan chamber. It remains to be seen whether, with the coalition government having split and Junts having left, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) will maintain its support for the speakership in Parliament going to a Junts candidate or, on the contrary, new alliances will be established by ERC or by Junts as well. Disagreement between them could also give the speakership to a representative of the PSC, which was the winner of the elections of February 14th, 2021.