The former president of the Generalitat Valenciana and former Minister of Labor, Eduardo Zaplana, sits again this Thursday in the dock of the fourth section of the Valencia Court to be tried for the alleged crimes of prevarication, document falsification, bribery, criminal organization and money laundering. Zaplana returns to court after, on February 1, the convalescence of his lawyer, who underwent surgery, forced a postponement.
The judgment of the call wasteland case This will begin almost six years after the PP leader was arrested for his alleged participation in a scheme to collect illegal commissions after the awarding of the wind energy parks and the vehicle technical inspection (ITV) stations. The Prosecutor's Office requests 19 years in prison for Aznar's former minister.
The sessions will resume this Thursday, with the previous questions and, as planned, Zaplana's statement will be on Tuesday, April 9. The trial will last, in principle, for about five months. In addition to Zaplana, 14 other people sit on the bench, among whom is his successor, the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana José Luis Olivas who, according to the accusation, also took bribes from the concessionaires, the business group of the Cotino brothers.
According to the investigation, Eduardo Zaplana led a plot in which he implicated people he completely trusted, to collect commissions, launder them and return those benefits to Spain, according to Anti-Corruption charges, which raises the money that moved the company to 20.6 million euros. organization. For the return to Spain and from tax havens, the network designed “a corporate structure in charge of collecting criminal funds and transforming them through different mechanisms that aim to hide their origin and ownership to introduce the cash into the financial circuit, taking advantage of the organization of illegally obtained profits,” according to the Prosecutor's Office.
One of the main assets of the prosecution is the testimony of Fernando Belhot, the Uruguayan lawyer who was in charge of the “fiscal optimization” of the assets of the network and who, he said, always knew that Zaplana, with whom he met several times, times a year, he was behind the operation. Belhot delivered 6.7 million euros to the asset recovery office (ORGA), which is supposedly part of the 20 million that Anti-Corruption believes were received fraudulently.
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