Found guilty and punished. The High Court of Catalonia (TSJC) has sentenced Laura Borràs to 4 and a half years in prison and 13 years of disqualification from public office after finding her guilty of a crime of abuse of authority and another of document falsification, according to the judgment made public this Thursday. The actions which the court attributes to Borràs, current president of the pro-independence Junts party and suspended speaker of the Catalan Parliament, took place when she was director of the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC), between 2013 and 2017, and are centred on the irregular fragmentation of contracts for work carried out on the Institute's website.
The court proposes to the Spanish government that it pardon Borràs and reduce her sentence to 2 years in prison in order to avoid her having to serve jail time. But it asserts that the disqualification from office holding should be maintained. In the sentence, the court - with the president of the TJSC, Jesús Maria Barrientos, as reporting judge - describes as "disproportionate and excessive" the prison sentence that must be imposed, following the current provisions of the penal code, when compared to the "behaviours" of the defendants, with regard to whom he maintains that there was no personal gain, but rather, the presentation of false budget quotes, with all the work on the ILC website actually being done as contracted.
The sentence is not unanimous: there is a minority vote by one of the three judges, Maria Jesús Manzano, who considers that the crimes must be analyzed separately, and that due to undue delays, Borràs should be sentenced to 21 months in prison. As for the disqualification from office for the crime of abuse of authority, this judge argues that should only apply to jobs where there is responsibility for contracting.
The public prosecutor had asked for a sentence of 6 years in prison and 21 years of disqualification from public office for the suspended speaker of the Catalan Parliament for awarding the job of creating an updated website for the institution in installment contracts, with a total value of around 335,000 euros, to Isaias Herrero, who is sentenced by the court to 2 years' prison, with his friend, Andreu Pujol, sentenced to 1 year and 3 months in prison for the same crimes, a reduction that the prosecutor had requested due to the mitigating confessions made by both defendants. The sentence is not final, and Borràs's lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, will probably appeal to the Supreme Court.
In the judgment, the court maintains that Borràs awarded the updating of the Institute's website to Herrero, without holding a public tender process, and that in spite of officials' recommendations, she adapted the work into 18 minor contracts, which "she signed".
The political effects
This criminal process caused the Bureau of the Catalan Parliament to suspend Laura Borràs as speaker of the Catalan chamber, at the end of July last year. The PSC, ERC and the CUP parties asked for article 25.4 of the rules of Parliament to be applied to Borràs, under which the rights and duties of a deputy must be suspended when a trial is opened for them over crimes linked to corruption. Borràs insists that she has suffered "political persecution" for defending the independence of Catalonia and that this case "is not related to corruption" because the prosecutor withdrew the crime of misuse of public funds. With the sentence, Junts must decide whether to accept Borràs's replacement in her speakership role, or for the party to relinquish its hold of the position, just as it left the Catalan government.
And, although it is not a final sentence - being subject to appeal - the Central Electoral Commission (JEC) can now demand that Parliament withdraw Borràs's seat as an MP, because she has been convicted of crimes against the public administration, as the JEC herself successfully asserted with former Catalan president Quim Torra and the CUP deputy Pau Juvillà.