One after another, the Civil Guard agents who testified this Friday in the trial for the so-called
Erial case
have assured that their experience in the investigation of other cases of corruption has led them to know that the union of “public awards” under suspicion and “companies in Luxembourg” are symptoms of an operation of bites and money laundering. One after another, the defense of the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana and former minister Eduardo Zaplana has tried to discredit his work, the searches in homes and offices and the seizure of documents.
The trial of Zaplana for the alleged rigging in the awards of the ITV and the wind farms of the Valencian Community when he presided over the autonomous administration has begun its testimonial phase today, at which time the investigators have begun to ratify before the court reflected in reports and proceedings. The first were the civil guards who carried out the searches in which, among others, the document that began the Eiral case was seized, in which, on five typewritten and crossed out pages, the plot exposes, according to the investigation, the summary of the “procedures carried out” on public awards, the bidding companies and the amount that they had to pay to obtain the contracts. The document was located during the investigation of another case in which Marcos Benavent, known as the Money Junkie, is involved. According to what he stated on his day, the document that includes the roadmap for the rigging was delivered by a citizen who rented a home that had been owned by the president of the Generalitat Eduardo Zaplana.
The agents have defended the legality of the operation in which they seized the documents and the fidelity of the words of the Syrian citizen who told them about the origin of the route sheet. Furthermore, they have maintained that the analysis of this, together with a clipping from a media outlet in which the awards were discussed, already made them suspect that there could be a plot and collusion between the awarding of the concessions and the companies of the Cotino family. “They suggested a possible rigging or intention,” indicated one of the members of the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard of the Civil Guard. “After 12 years of experience, dedicating myself to economic investigation and other corruption cases, documentation like this, for me, meant the possibility of money laundering,” he insisted.
This was not the first time that attempts have been made to discredit or annul the investigations that began the operation for which Zaplana ended up arrested in 2018, accused of embezzlement, bribery and banking, among other crimes. The Money Junker himself changed his strategy in November 2021 and went from collaborating with justice to trying to torpedo it by trying to remove documents such as the one pointing to Eduardo Zaplana from the investigation. The defense of the former Valencian president, which has been joined by that of some other accused (there are up to 15 in the case), has also been insistent today to the point that the president of the court of the Valencia Court that is judging the case has ordered not to persist in questions that the witnesses had already answered.
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