The PP presented an appeal requesting the acquittal of Luis Bárcenas, but the PP was not aware of that appeal. It seems more like the formulation of a quantum physics problem than the real legal position of a party, but that is what happened in the middle of the popular transfer of power. That is why now the new leadership of the PP will withdraw the appeal, which Alberto Núñez Feijóo claims to have known this Monday “through the press”, and for which he blames exclusively the party’s lawyer.
The legal advice of the PP had demanded that the Supreme Court annul the sentence of the National High Court last October that condemned him as subsidiary civil liability for the works at the Genoa headquarters that were paid in black. In that letter, the acquittal of former treasurer Luis Bárcenas, sentenced to two years in prison in that case for having paid the Unifica company more than one million euros for the reform of the national headquarters of the PP, is demanded.
The deputy secretary general of the PP Esteban González Pons has assured in a press conference that everything has been a misunderstanding, since the legal advice did not inform the new leaders of the procedure that had been completed. “The national leadership learned today that an appeal from lawyers requests” the acquittal of Bárcenas, he said.
“It was written in November and was presented ad cautelam three days before the PP congress. We think that it was part of the defense of the party, but in this case the legal strategy collides with the political strategy, that is why the leadership has made the decision to withdraw that resource”, added the person in charge of the Institutional area of the PP.
And that the lawyer ratified the presentation of the appeal in mid-April, when Feijóo was already president of the PP. But, always according to the Genoa version, he did not notify the new party leaders that he was asking for the acquittal of Bárcenas as a legal strategy. Genoa sources insist that the new management did not know the content until today. So much so, they say, that at first they thought it was not true, but then they found that it was.
That is, Feijóo did not know what his lawyer was doing. Hence, the PP is going to “assess” what more measures it takes. That is to say: if the legal person in charge of the party ceases to act -according to the official version- on his behalf or not.
The truth is that Bárcenas appears 76 times in the appeal signed by the lawyer Jesús Santos, who works for the PP from outside the organization. So the only plausible explanation for the new leadership of the PP is that nobody had access to the document and, therefore, nobody had been able to read it. In the Genoa team they affirm that the head of internal legal advice, Alberto Durán, did not report anything and he would ultimately be responsible.
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