The European Prosecutor’s Office, which wants to investigate IUSU contracts, is a new body that is under Gurtel’s whip.

The future of Isabel Diaz Ayuso’s brother’s contract investigation closed this week. The prosecution unanimously supported the anti-corruption proposal to continue the investigation into the masked contract, thus rejecting the request of the European prosecution, which must now decide whether to continue the investigation independently. This body, less than a year old, wants to investigate whether European funds have been affected by alleged violations investigated in Spain. Despite operating for so long, the European Prosecutor’s Office has already received more than a hundred complaints from Spain and has in its ranks investigators who have experience in the biggest corruption schemes in our country.

The body was set up in October 2017, when Spain and 19 other member states agreed to set up a European Public Prosecutor’s Office to bring to justice those who commit crimes against the “financial interests of the Union”. It was only last summer that this prosecution came into force, with an organic law governing the adaptation of the Spanish legal system and several names of the Spanish delegation: Concepcion Sabadell and Pablo Rose, among others. The first is the prosecutor who assisted in the prosecution of Gurtel’s case. The second is a judge who for the first time considered the existence of a black box in the People’s Party to be proven.

There is no public data on how many cases this European prosecutor’s office has investigated during its months of operation, but Concepcion Sadadel himself has revealed that in Spain it has started quickly and strongly. In an interview with the Spanish General Council of Lawyers (CGAE) website in February, the Spanish-appointed prosecutor explained that he had received “about 2,800 complaints, about 600 investigations have been launched” and that the Iberian country had gained popularity. Fast. “We have received many complaints from individuals, more than a hundred,” Sabadell said of the data affecting Spain. In most cases, he continued, they would check whether these cases were under their jurisdiction because “we are not competent for all the crimes and unfortunately we will not receive many of these complaints.”

Now one such case is the case of Priviet Sportive SL and the € 1.5 million contract, which was manually awarded by the Community of Madrid in the worst case of the first wave of the introduction of masks into Spain. The contract, as revealed by elDiario.es, was awarded to President Isabel Diaz Ayuso’s family-friendly businessman, for which his brother, Thomas Dias Ayuso, received a commission. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is taking its first steps and there are several cases that have already been initiated or ended with sentences in one of the EU countries. “It is clear that with a noticeable increase in funding, the risk of fraud will increase,” Sabadell told the CGAE. Especially in our country. “In Spain, I believe that subsidy fraud will be the highest percentage of our procedures. “We are still starting, but it seems to point in that direction,” he explained.

This is what the European Prosecutor’s Office wants to investigate in Priviet Sportive, and Spanish law, signed last year, regulates in its fourth article how far it can go. They can prosecute the EU treasury when it comes to national taxes, counterfeiting and European aid, money laundering, bribery or embezzlement, when they affect the EU’s financial interests and, ultimately, criminal organizations. In the case of this contract, they understand that EU money could have been squandered, something that anti-corruption, the origins of the conflict, have so far denied.

The rule makes it clear that the European Prosecutor’s Office has nothing to do in Carte Blanc before the investigative courts that investigate these cases, but they can take actions just like the Spanish Prosecutor’s Office: to ask for help from the authorities, give. Instructions to the Judicial Police but not to other members of the Prosecution, although they may request their co-operation through the State Attorney General. In addition, the Guarantee Judge ensures that all such investigations are conducted in the National High Court, for example, authorizing investigative procedures or agreeing on precautionary measures if necessary.

From Gurtel to Luxembourg

On June 27, 2020, a year before its launch, the Council of Europe appointed European prosecutors to lead Romanian lawyer Laura Condruta Caves. Among them were French counterterrorism prosecutor Frederic Baab, a German prosecutor specializing in cybercrime, André Ritter, and Spanish representative Concepcion Sabadel Carnisero. This prosecutor with 25 years of experience joined the Gipuzkoa Prosecutor’s Office in 1997 and ten years later was appointed a member of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, then headed by Antonio Salinas. His name has been linked to one of the biggest corruption cases in the National High Court over the past decade: the Gurtel conspiracy.

His signature is on a letter calling for more than 100 years in prison in the first major trial of Francisco Correa’s corruption conspiracy, and his voice was one that confirmed to judges that he believed the People’s Party should be condemned as a profit. In Majadahonda and Pozuelo de Alarcon, for the use of black money. In October 2017, Sabadell said that the “People’s Party B Box”, which eventually led to the departure of Mariano Rajoy’s government, was “complete and absolute accreditation.”

He is accompanied by seven delegated European prosecutors, also selected by Spain, who are part of the European Prosecutors. Nor are corruption investigations foreign. One of them is Pablo Rose, a judge who took over the reins of the Gurtel case in 2012 after appearing in the National High Court two years ago as a replacement for Baltasar Garzon. During the three years that he investigated the conspiracy, several important milestones of the case arose: he facilitated the investigation into the parallel registration of the People’s Party. In Switzerland and left a work called “Epoch I” ready for trial in which PP was accused of exploiting the conspiracy.

Another name on the list of members of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office is Laura Pelon, an anti-corruption prosecutor in the Balearic Islands who has filed charges in cases such as Sean Espasse against former President Jaume Matas. For her part, Gloria Yoshiko Kondo has been working as an economic crime specialist since 2011 and was part of a team of prosecutors who demanded and achieved the closure of an open case around the 2020 feminist 8M. Joaquin Gonzalez-Herrero, for his part. Since 2018 he has been a Prosecutor of the National Supreme Court and has served as an Adviser to the European Anti-Fraud Office. Along with them, Ohiana Azqué, Maria Elena Lorente and Olga Munoz are also training.