Tuesday, February 7, 2023, 20:28
The former president of Parliament, Laura Borràs, sits on the bench this Friday, accused of prevarication and documentary falsification. She faces six years in prison, in a trial that will be held between this Friday and March 1 at the TSJC courthouse. Last-minute movements complicate the situation for the president of Junts. There will be three defendants on the bench: Laura Borràs, Isaías Herrero and Andreu Pujol. Herrero, a friend of Borràs, was the beneficiary of the contracts that Laura Borràs allegedly divided during her time as director of the Institution of Catalan Letters, an entity of the Generalitat. The case could turn around and compromise the nationalist leader if the negotiation between Herrero and the Prosecutor’s Office bears fruit. The friend of the former president of Parliament also faces six years in prison and would be willing to indict the Junts leader in exchange for a reduction in sentence by the Prosecutor’s Office. He is yet to see.
Herrero already agreed in his day with the Prosecutor’s Office in another case for which he was sentenced to five years in prison. In that case he was convicted of drug trafficking. In fact, the criminal case against Laura Borràs started by rebound and by chance. The friend of the former president of Parliament, a computer scientist, had his phone tapped by the Mossos, who were investigating him for drug-related matters. It was in a conversation with a friend, when he released the phrase “I invoice some trapis” with the now president of Junts, which put the Catalan Police on the trail of the nationalist leader. From there he started an investigation into her, which concludes this Friday at the start of the trial. Herrero has already been convicted and a second conviction would increase his risk of going to prison, so the pressure is maximum. The Public Ministry asks him for a confession in which he says that he limited himself to following Borràs’ instructions on how to divide the contracts so that he could award him the public contracts.
This is the trick of the Prosecutor’s Office to accuse the president of Junts. Instead, the nationalist leader still trusts that the judges will knock down one of the main pieces of evidence that incriminates her. These are the emails that Borràs and Herrero exchanged and in which the mechanics of how to divide contracts to circumvent administrative controls are described. Borràs’ lawyer, Gonzalo Boye, assures that these alleged incriminating emails were obtained by the Mossos without judicial guarantee and the chain of custody was not respected. The judge has to decide this Friday in the previous questions whether or not he admits these emails as evidence.
