The Audiencia Nacional has acquitted all those accused of the alleged payment of illegal commissions, between 2006 and 2016, to authorities and officials in Angola to secure contracts in favor of Mercasa, such as the construction of a wholesale market in Luanda. Among them, the court has cleared several former executives of the public company, which was ultimately not tried, after the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office withdrew the accusation at the start of the trial, which began on February 2.
The so-called Mercasa case began in 2018 as a spin-off of the judicial investigation related to the alleged irregular sale of weapons in Angola through Defex, another partially public company dedicated to arms trade. Eight years later, the magistrates of Section Four of the Criminal Chamber of the Audiencia Nacional consider that the awarding of a contract in Luanda was not related to the payment of bribes.
The “works for the construction of the Luanda wholesale market were executed in accordance with the Law, without the Mercasa consortium allocating money, directly or indirectly through third parties, to corrupt Angolan authorities and officials or to carry out any action contrary to current legislation,” states the ruling dated this Tuesday. In the 424 pages of the sentence, the court presided over by magistrate Teresa Palacios concludes that “the existence of bribes to those authorities and officials that would vitiate the awards made has not been detected, beyond mere hypotheses and speculations.”
“A disproportionate ‘demonization’ of the agreed commissions is also observed in the proceedings, in contracts signed in a country that had just ended a civil war and where legal and conventional structures were characterized by their rigidity. Hence, it was logical for the contractual parties to ensure their emoluments or remunerations,” the sentence emphasizes.
With all this, the Audiencia Nacional has acquitted 15 individuals and three companies of the crimes of corruption in international commercial transactions, embezzlement of public funds, money laundering, document forgery, and belonging to a criminal organization.
Among the people who sat in the dock are the former president of the public company, former PP deputy Miguel Ramírez González; former executives Arturo Cortés de Cruz and María Jesús Prieto Jiménez; businessman José Herrero de Egaña, nephew of Ignacio López del Hierro, ex-husband of former PP secretary general María Dolores de Cospedal; and diplomat José María Castroviejo, who was stationed in Angola as Spain’s ambassador between January 2009 and June 2012.
Likewise, among the accused was the commercial agent Guilherme Augusto de Oliveira Tabeira Pinto (considered the “commission agent” or “lobbyist”), who was not tried as he was a fugitive from justice. However, the ruling of the Audiencia Nacional highlights that it has also not been proven that he received any money from the consortium for expenses related to gifts, travel, and accommodation for officials of that country.
Throughout the resolution, of which magistrate Juan Francisco Martel was the rapporteur, the Criminal Chamber examined the statements of the accused, the witness testimonies, and the expert reports presented during the oral hearing, and questioned the presentation of facts made by the accusations, especially by the public prosecutor. According to the magistrates, the Prosecutor’s Office provided a large number of data that, instead of helping to clarify the facts, “greatly hindered the correct understanding of the issues raised.”
Along these lines, the court maintains that the defenses presented much more forceful expert reports than the accusations to demonstrate that there were no spurious dealings. In fact, it states that the accusations “followed the reports of the Civil Guard by using data from a temporal period prior to those considered by the defense experts.”
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