The National Court on Monday kicked off the first trial on the so-called Lezo case, the judicial investigation focused on alleged irregularities committed by senior PP officials in the Community of Madrid. This oral hearing focuses on the 2001 purchase process of the Colombian company Inassa by the public entity Canal de Isabel II (with an alleged multimillion overprice). Among the two dozen defendants sitting on the bench are, among others, Pedro Calvo Poch and Juan Bravo, former councilors of the regional government of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, for whom the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is seeking seven years in prison.
The trial began with the preliminary issues phase, which the defenses took advantage of to raise the statute of limitations for the crimes attributed to the defendants and to request the dismissal of the charges.
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The oral hearing started almost a decade after the outbreak of the case, which led to the arrest of Ignacio González, who was the trusted man of the regional president Esperanza Aguirre and her successor at the head of the Community of Madrid government. González is not sitting on the bench in this trial that has just begun, but he will have to do so for three other lines of investigation of Lezo: for rigging several contracts for the construction and maintenance of the Canal de Isabel II golf course; for the alleged plan devised for that public entity to buy the Brazilian company Emissao between 2012 and 2013 for an amount higher than its real value; and for the alleged distribution of a 1.8 million euro bribe in exchange for awarding the Navalcarnero train project worth 360 million to OHL. For all this, which is scheduled to be tried from October, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requests a total of 18 years in prison for González.
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