2023-06-14 22:06:44
Prosecutor Luis Ibáñez Cuesta, one of the four candidates for the position of prosecutor for Democratic Memory for which Dolores Delgado has been appointed, stated in his “action plan” that the law that must be applied by whoever occupies that post “is indifferent to the majority of the social body. There is an apparent contradiction that Luis Ibáñez is the only one of those four candidates who is going to insist on his goal of reaching the position and has announced that he is going to appeal the election of the former attorney general.
Candidates for a position in the Prosecutor’s Office must submit their “action plan”, to which all members of the career have access, and be evaluated by the State Attorney General. Ibáñez uses the letter to express his mistrust in the future of the post of prosecutor of Memoria Democrática. “It happens that certain political sectors have repeatedly announced that if their legislative capacity allows them to do so in the near future, they will repeal Law 20/2022,” Ibáñez wrote on May 25.
Currently assigned to the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office, Luis Ibáñez considered challenging the appointment of Dolores Delgado the day after it occurred, according to Vozpópuli announced last Friday. Today, the president of the PP and candidate for the Presidency of the Government, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has assured in an interview on esRadio that his intention is to “repeal the prosecutor’s office [de Memoria Democrática] or, where appropriate, empty it of content”. The PP leader had already warned in the past that he will also repeal the Democratic Memory Law, approved by the current government to repair the victims of the dictatorship.
The criticism of the law is shared with the leader of the PP by the prosecutor who aspires to be appointed to the position from which he must apply it. “The law that, after all, creates this new position in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, contains an important ideological charge in socio-political terms. And this is not only deduced from the mere reading of the legal text, but is also clearly detected from the reactions and sensations that its promulgation has had in sectors of society and in practically the entire political spectrum”, writes in his candidacy the Ibanez himself.
The prosecutor already anticipates that, if elected, he will carry out an “aseptic” application of the legal text pending its repeal. “It is true that the vast majority of the social body is indifferent, either due to ignorance of the norm, or because its prescriptions are not among their priorities. But this last circumstance does not deprive the much-repeated law of its ideological aspect, a aspect that I understand must be compensated with an aseptic performance of the Court Prosecutor in the performance of the powers conferred by the Law and the Statute ”, he assures.
Prosecutor Ibáñez added in his “action plan” that the repeal of the law “would bring with it an emptying of an important part of the functions of this new specialized Prosecutor’s Office, which would make the detailing of an action project useless.” Or what is the same, since the applicant assumes that another government will repeal the Democratic Memory Law, he saves himself from explaining what his project is as a prosecutor who must ensure compliance with it. In fact, his plan, barely three pages long, begins with a warning: “I will be extremely brief in exposing my acting project.”
The conservative association, on the warpath
The conservative Association of Prosecutors, the majority in the race, raised its seven members of the Prosecutor Council to not participate in the advisory vote on Dolores Delgado, in protest at what they considered a safe appointment of the former Minister of Justice and former State Attorney General . The Association of Prosecutors and the Professional and Independent Association of Prosecutors (APIF), with one member, consider that Delgado is incapacitated for office because her sentimental partner, Baltasar Garzón, has a direct interest in cases of democratic memory and has been demanding the creation of that square since 2014.
The aforementioned associations asked the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, to intervene to prevent the appointment of Delgado and not to refer it to the Council of Ministers, which yesterday confirmed Delgado’s appointment. Prosecutor Ibáñez will now appeal to the Contentious-Administrative Section of the Supreme Court the appointment of Dolores Delgado, a power that the prosecutors’ associations do not have.
Higher category and salary
Anti-drug prosecutor Ibáñez was the only conservative of the four candidates for the position. Like Delgado, the other two remaining belong to the Progressive Union of Prosecutors. One of them is the former Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Carlos Castresana, with a broader and more prominent career than Ibáñez and who has not announced any challenge after not being elected.
But with such disinterest in democratic memory and the disqualification that he makes of the text that motivates the creation of the plaza to which he aspires, why so much insistence from Ibáñez? The explanation is that the position means his promotion to the category of room prosecutor. In addition, Ibáñez speculates that, once the law is repealed, the prosecutor must give him new functions, in accordance with his new category and salary.
It is obvious to say that in such a case [la derogación de la ley]not at all improbable, it would be the State Attorney General who would transmute the functions of this new position, assigning him any of the many necessary tasks that the Public Prosecutor assumes ”, Ibáñez quotes verbatim.
The prosecutor who asked to file the case of the 3% that splashed Cospedal
Luis Ibáñez was chief prosecutor of Castilla-La Mancha during the autonomous government of María Dolores de Cospedal. As such, he filed the accusation of administrative prevarication for the concession of the garbage contract for the city of Toledo to a subsidiary of Sacyr, a PP donor company in the Bárcenas papers, in exchange for a 3% bribe to finance the electoral campaign of Cospedal in 2007.
The case was opened at the end of 2015, after the revelation of Luis Bárcenas, who declared in the National Court that he had received 200,000 euros from the Sacyr company, an amount that he had later delivered to the manager of the Castilian-La Mancha PP, José Ángel Cañas, who signed a receipt of the operation. The destination of the money would be the electoral campaign of María Dolores de Cospedal to the presidency of the Junta de Castilla-La Mancha in 2007.
The investigation initiated by Judge Pablo Ruz, who later referred the case to Toledo, did not see a crime in the awarding of the contract in 2007, but it did in a subsequent decision that tried to close a SUFI labor conflict just before the elections, for what the magistrate was inhibited in favor of a local court.
Prosecutor Ibáñez’s request to the Investigating Court number 3 of Toledo to archive the case came in full swing of the first major trial of the Gürtel case, whose sentence would lead to the motion of censure against Rajoy. Prosecutor Ibáñez did not see a crime in the City Council’s decision to increase the budget by 11 million to pay for a labor conflict at Sufi, the Sacyr subsidiary, and although he detected irregularities, he defended the urgency of the decision of the council given the proximity of “the largest festival of the city of Toledo”.
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