The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court has asked the Public Prosecutor’s Office to study a complaint filed by the PSPV-PSOE against the former president of the Valencian Generalitat, Carlos Mazón, for an alleged crime of false testimony in the Congress of Deputies, according to a document from the high court accessed by EL PAÍS. The socialists denounced the popular politician for allegedly lying in November in the lower house’s investigation committee on the DANA, the catastrophe that left 231 dead in Valencia on October 29, 2024.
Read more Almost half of the residents affected by the L9 sinkhole still have no return date
“Forward the proceedings to the Public Prosecutor’s Office for a report on the jurisdiction and content of the complaint filed,” states a document from the high court dated last July 13.
To resolve the complaint, the Supreme Court has appointed magistrate Manuel Marchena as rapporteur, the judge who presided over the court in 2019 in the procés case -the illegal Catalan referendum of 2017- and drafted the sentence that condemned nine pro-independence leaders to high prison sentences for sedition and embezzlement.
The Penal Code, in its article 502.3, provides for prison sentences of six months to one year or a fine of six to twelve months for lying in a parliamentary investigation committee.
The socialists’ complaint focuses on the contradictions between the arguments presented by Mazón in Congress and the investigation by the judge of Catarroja (Valencia), Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, who has been investigating the management of the tragedy for 19 months. The magistrate has dismantled, point by point, the exculpatory narrative of the Generalitat and of the two defendants in the case: the former Minister of Justice and Interior, Salomé Pradas, and her former second-in-command during the flood, Emilio Argüeso.
Read more Innovation, water and resilience, drivers of the ecological transformation in Galicia
The ‘information blackout’ thesis
In his intervention in the lower house, the popular politician put forward the theory of the information blackout. A thesis he clung to for more than a year and which has been dismantled by the judge in dozens of rulings. The idea held that if the Valencian Executive did not react better and faster to the tragedy, it was because agencies of Pedro Sánchez’s Government, such as the Júcar Hydrographic Confederation (CHJ) or the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet), did not inform in advance of the dimension of the flood. Mazón appealed in Congress to the “information blackout” to try to justify not changing his agenda, which on the day of the disaster included an almost four-hour lunch at the El Ventorro restaurant and an afternoon stroll through the center of Valencia while the Poyo ravine, the rambla that caused the disaster, overflowed. The complaint states that Pradas sent a report to a WhatsApp group – in which Mazón was included – warning of the risk at 10:40 in the morning, as revealed by this newspaper.
The ‘El Ventorro’ dilemma
Mazón also incurred contradictions when explaining his itinerary from when he left El Ventorro until he arrived at Cecopi, the Generalitat’s body in L’Eliana (Valencia) that coordinated the crisis and where the president arrived at 8:28 p.m., 17 minutes after the sending of Es Alert, the mass mobile alert that was sent to inform the population of the magnitude of the flood. “Mazón lied when answering the question about where he was between seven and eight in the evening,” the complaint states. In that time frame, the leader was with journalist Maribel Vilaplana in a parking lot in the heart of Valencia, as revealed by the reporter in her appearance as a witness before the judge.
Revisiting the deaths
The record of when the first deaths were confirmed also focuses the socialists’ complaint. Although Mazón assured Congress that “there were no human losses until well into the early morning,” the judge’s investigations have revealed that, at 11:45 on October 29, 2024, truck driver José Hernaiz was no longer answering his phone. Hernaiz was the first fatality of the DANA. Between 1:00 p.m. and 4:59 p.m., 10 deaths were registered. When the Generalitat sent the mobile alert at 8:11 p.m., at least 156 people had already died and another 37 were in critical condition, according to the summary.
The alarm of discord
The contradictions regarding Es Alert, the mass mobile alert sent at 8:11 p.m. and whose delay is the focus of the judge’s investigations, also loom in the socialists’ complaint. In the lower house, Mazón assured that the notification was sent “when the operational commanders understood it was the right moment to do so.” However, Minister Pradas was responsible for authorizing the sending of this message, despite the fact that, in her first statement as an investigated party, she even said that she —who was organically the highest responsible for Emergencies of the Generalitat— “did not direct anything.”
Read more Barça closes its eighth summer signing: Tyrese Martin arrives from the NBA