This Monday the start of the trial on . Juan Carlos Ruiz (PP), former Minister of Industry, Tourism, Business and Innovation of Murcia, has sat on the bench; the one who was his chief of staff, Fidel Saura Guerrero; Diego Conesa, former socialist mayor of Cartagena and six other people. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requests prison sentences of between two and a half and four years; and fines of up to 150,000 euros for crimes of influence peddling, prevarication and fraud, among others.
Starting this Monday, the Criminal Chamber of the National Court will study the evidence regarding the use of public money to pay businessman Alejandro de Pedro for image-washing campaigns on the internet in favor of politicians. The Prosecutor’s Office requests two and a half years in prison for De Pedro. Among other accusations, he accuses Ruiz of trying to camouflage a payment of 20,040 euros to Eico, De Pedro’s company, in a contract with the Murcia Tourism Institute. The community did not put out to public tender the commission for said image improvement campaign. The former counselor faces the highest request from the public ministry: he demands that he be sentenced to four years in prison for crimes of fraud, influence peddling and prevarication.
In the first of the 16 scheduled sessions, where the questions prior to the trial were raised, Ruiz’s defense alleged that the reputation work benefited “the department, not the counselor.” And he has requested the partial annulment of the Prosecutor’s order. On the other hand, , has withdrawn the accusation against Eico and Madiva, two De Pedro companies.
Since the first accusations in 2014, according to the summary, more than 40 PP politicians benefited from De Pedro’s services, especially in Madrid, Murcia and León. In one of the lines of research, focused on De Pedro’s work in Madrid, the , arguing that “it is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between the institutional promotion of the position a person occupies, and his personal political prestige, when it comes to carrying out promotion or advertising on the internet. In the Leonese branch, but they received lesser penalties of disqualification.
The next session will take place next Thursday, January 16, when the preliminary issues phase will continue — which has not ended this Monday. Then the interrogations of witnesses will begin. The magistrates have decided that the accused can testify at the end.
