The National Court sentences five PP mayors and one PSOE mayor for the biggest scam in the Púnica plot

The biggest scandal uncovered in Operation Púnica has now been ruled on. The National Court has convicted five mayors from the PP, one from the PSOE, and another from a local party for “corrupt practices” in the rigging of public contracts in several municipalities in the Community of Madrid between 2012 and 2014 in favor of the energy efficiency company Cofely España. Two other PP councilors who sat in the dock have been acquitted. The longest sentence, eight years and two months in prison, was handed down to a businessman, David Marjaliza, the ringleader of the plot, whose testimony made him the first major turncoat in the fight against corruption in Spain by allowing progress to be made in a major case with several lines of investigation still to be tried in the Púnica case, the network that had Marjaliza himself and Francisco Granados, regional minister during the governments of Esperanza Aguirre, at its epicenter. The ruling announced on Monday imposes significantly lower sentences on all those convicted than those initially requested by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, as the court applied the mitigating factor of undue delay, given that more than 11 years have passed since the investigation of the case began in June 2014 and the sentence was handed down. In addition, a dozen of them also received mitigating circumstances for confessing to the irregularities committed, and several others for having handed over various amounts of money to compensate for the damage caused. In the case of Marjaliza, 38 works of art valued at €15.6 million that he had hidden in Switzerland were seized in 2015. He helped to repatriate them in order to meet his financial responsibilities in this case and the rest of the macro-case. One of the former mayors convicted is José María Fraile, former socialist councilor of Parla (Madrid), whom the court has sentenced to two years and four months in prison for fraud, prevarication, bribery, and influence peddling for rigging a €54.6 million energy efficiency contract in his municipality. In its initial indictment, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office sought an 11-year prison sentence for him. Fraile was one of the defendants who admitted to the crimes committed and to having received a gift of €500,000 for rigging the tender to benefit Cofely. For his part, the former mayor of Serranillos del Valle, Antonio Sánchez Fernández, of the local Madrid Democratic Union (UDMA) party, was sentenced by the court to two years and 10 months in prison for the same crimes. The former mayor of the Madrid municipality of Moraleja de Enmedio, Carlos Alberto Estrada, of the PP, has been sentenced to four years and six months in prison for the crime of prevarication in conjunction with another of bribery. The same sentence was imposed on Agustín Juárez López de Coca, former mayor of Villalba for the PP, while Daniel Ortiz, former councilor for Móstoles, received a three-year prison sentence for bribery during his term of office in this town, the second most populous in the Community of Madrid. For that specific case of rigging, the same sentence was also imposed on the councilor of his party, Alejandro Utrilla, and his brother, Mario Utrilla, who was then a PP councilor in the town of Sevilla La Nueva and also held a seat in the Madrid Assembly. None of them acknowledged during the hearing their involvement in the events that the court ultimately considered proven. The one who did admit the facts was the fifth former PP mayor convicted, Gonzalo Cubas, who was a councilor in Torrejón de Velasco and is Marjaliza's brother-in-law. The National Court did not impose a prison sentence on him, but rather three years of disqualification from public office. The two former PP mayors who were finally acquitted were José García Lobato, who served as mayor of Almendralejo (Badajoz), and José Carlos Boza Lechuga, from Valdemoro (Madrid), for whom the court found that there was no evidence of criminal activity during their time in office. The ruling convicts 28 of the 36 people who sat in the dock when the trial began last April. It also convicts Cofely, in this case as a legal entity, imposing a fine of €3.6 million for the crimes of bribery and influence peddling, although it acquits it of money laundering. The ruling emphasizes that its internal control mechanisms to prevent corrupt activities failed during the three years that the scheme was active. Three of its executives have also been convicted and sentenced to prison terms. Among them are the then CEO, Didier Roger Maurice, and the former commercial director, Constantino Álvarez, who have been sentenced to six years and six months for criminal organization, fraud against the government, bribery, and collaboration in a continuing crime of prevarication. The ruling considers it proven that, between March 2012 and October 2014, the now convicted executives of Cofely Spain and Marjaliza, who acted as a commission agent, “acted as a criminal organization with comprehensive planning, with a view to permanence and intervening in local councils” to obtain energy efficiency contracts in several municipalities. To this end, they paid bribes to public officials and civil servants involved in the awarding of contracts, from whom they obtained key information about the tender in advance and even influenced essential elements of the tenders, such as the economic evaluation formula or the evaluation criteria, giving them a key advantage over other companies competing for the tender. In their bid, the scheme included several items, such as one for auditing, which allowed them to pocket a sum of money paid by the local council as a surcharge, which they then used to pay bribes to the politicians and civil servants involved. “This dynamic has been repeated, with variations specific to each case, in practically all of the local councils affected,” the ruling emphasizes.