Prosecutor’s Office asks to archive the investigation against Colau for subsidies to related entities

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requests the provisional filing of the case against Barcelona City Council for allegedly fraudulent subsidies to related social entities. The prosecutor adds, although with nuances, to the request of the defense of the mayoress to request the provisional dismissal of the case, but not the free dismissal that the investigated had claimed.

The letter from the Prosecutor’s Office to the Investigating Court 21 of Barcelona asks “to banish the temptation of attributing possible criminal responsibilities to the person investigated on the flimsy argument of being the head of the City Council.”

The public ministry responds to the accusation made by the Association for Transparency and Democratic Quality (ATCD) and after reading the files provided and participating in the interrogations of the mayoress and the delegated auditor of the consistory assures that “it did not observe in any of the files irregularities of a criminal nature”.

The prosecutor adds that Colau delegated from the beginning of his term the granting of subsidies to administrative technicians. He adds that the endowments were unanimously approved by the Government Commission. Both facts “allow us to intuit the intervention of the mayoress in the files that could be processed for this reason.”

“The investigated does not dictate a single resolution -arbitrary or not- in the investigated administrative files nor, consequently, can it do so knowing its injustice”, ditch.

Finally, the Prosecutor’s Office assures that the organizations that are linked to the case did not obtain any favorable treatment. “The grants were processed in the same way as those for hundreds of entities,” he defends. The four entities linked to the mayoress are the DESC Observatory, the Platform for Mortgage Affected People, the Association Against Energy Poverty and Enginyers Sense Fronteres.

The Prosecutor’s Office was already critical of the accusation

The letter from the Prosecutor’s Office reaffirms the position of the public ministry, which has already expressed its reservations regarding the admission of the complaint for processing. Last year he had already investigated the subsidies granted by the Barcelona City Council without finding evidence of crime; something that he still does not see after the errands carried out.

In fact, in the last resolution, he criticized the ATCD for trying to turn the procedure into a “general cause” against Colau.