More trials approaching. The High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) announced today that it has completed its investigation against the speaker of parliament of Catalonia, Laura Borràs, along with three other people, for the case of splitting contracts, when she was director of a public cultural body, the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC). In the resolution, the judge Jordi Seguí, maintains that Borràs “abused her position” and that there is sufficient evidence to send her to trial for the continued crime of abuse of administrative power, administrative fraud, forgery of a commercial document and a continuous crime of misuse of public funds. And the case now passes to the prosecutors to present the indictment, with the defence also to present its written submission, final steps before the trial itself.
In the resolution, the investigating TSJC judge details the eighteen minor contracts (of 18,000 euros each) that Laura Borràs as director of the Institute approved for computer services on the ILC website between 2014 and 2017. Of this total, six were granted to Isaías Herrero, amounting to 112,502 euros. The court document also details that Borràs and Herrero knew each other before, having both worked in Hermeneia, a literary research body. Borràs and Herrero were assisted by Roger, Isaiah's brother-in-law, and Andreu, the ILC's head of administrative management, in carry out the alleged criminal actions, and these two will also be tried. The judge explains that there are e-mails in which Borràs explains to Herrero how to present budget proposals with his name and those of others concealed, such as through the Xarxa Integral cooperative, which won some of the tenders and paid Herrero about 22,000 euros. The total funds incolved in the alleged misuse was around 300,000 euros. In fact, the TSJC resolution was made public just hours after the speaker of the Catalan Parliament and a group of deputies from the JxCat and ERC parties, accompanied the Catalan culture minister, Natàlia Garriga, who today declared before the Catalan High Court in an investigation into an alleged role she played in the organization of the Catalan independence referendum on 1st October 2017.
Confession
The case against Laura Borràs began in 2018, when Herrero was being investigated for another case and had his phone monitored, and spoke to someone about his contracts with the ILC. The resolution reproduces Herrero's conversation, in which he said that he was afraid that due to the state's imposition of direct rule over Catalonia, following October 2017, his actions might be exposed. "I have a bit of a mess," Herrero said in one of the conversations, detailing what he did at the ILC: "two good budgets and four that weren't good." The Catalan Audit Office has already warned that it was not possible to sign consecutive contracts with the same supplier every year, and what needed to be done was a contractual relationship, and Andreu began to carry out the formalities, but, according to the TSJC judge, Borràs rejected this.
Judge Seguí concludes that “the evidence presented shows that Laura Borràs abused her functions as director of the ILC by making unfair decisions on approving eighteen minor contracts, with full awareness that awarding them contradicted the requirements of the legislation regulating the public sector contracts, omitting facts purely to favour the interests of Isaiah, to the detriment of defending the general interests that she had to defend”. It also states that "the electronic communications maintained between Borràs and Herrero are strong enough indications of the agreement between the two of them in order to defraud the ILC." For all this, the magistrate sends the speaker Borràs to trial.