The Seville court has annulled the case against businessman Juan Carlos Martínez, husband of the former director general of the Guardia Civil María Gámez, and continued a judicial investigation despite the expiry of legal deadlines. This formal deficiency nullifies the investigation of the Sevillian Investigative Court No. 6 into money laundering, embezzlement and embezzlement, which ended last March with the career of Gámez, who resigned a few hours after the proceedings against his partner were announced.
The defense of a brother-in-law of Gámez, who was also under investigation, claimed before the court that the investigation by the Instructional Court 6 exceeded the deadlines established by the Code of Criminal Procedure and that the Supreme Court had made it clear that these were “mandatory.” Martínez , who has been under investigation since last March, was accused of receiving funds indirectly from the Junta de Andalucía between 2009 and 2011, when the PSOE was in power, through a company owned by his brother Bienvenido.
The judges of the Sevillian court conclude that the investigation by the investigating judge José Ignacio Vilaplana against Martínez should have ended on July 29, 2022, but he and his brother were already summoned as an investigation on February 22, 2023. Therefore, all decisions and investigations of the Investigative Court 6 after July 2022 will be canceled. The Supreme Court clarified in previous rulings that the time limits set out in Article 324 of the 2015 Lecrim Law, established in 2015 to prevent judicial investigations from dragging on, are “their own procedural time limits without the possibility of recovery (…), they are not flexible but “compulsory or exhaustive,” recalls the court order of last Tuesday, reported by Diario de Sevilla this Friday.
In the case of the court examining the macro matter of the ERE with its 140 parts, the Sevillian 6th Instruction, this obligation to extend the investigation from time to time has taken its toll and, in cases like this, has put an end to the ongoing investigations. Now the judges of the court consider that “a situation of procedural crisis” arose on July 29, 2022, since the investigation period was not extended.
The investigation against Martínez arose from the proceedings initiated with the involvement of the Andalusian government against the defunct Santana Motor automobile group, which in turn were separated from the ERE case in 2015. In the case, which will be closed as soon as the investigating judge complies with the court’s order, the Martínez brothers, the former director of the Idea agency Jacinto Cañete and the former administrator of the Fagia joint stock company Carlos Fernández are accused.
The Sevillian court emphasizes in its decision that it is “obvious” that the people under investigation in the now archived case “were already being investigated for the same facts in the previous investigation 3969/2015”. [de Santana Motor]“. The judges are of the opinion that, in terms of procedural time limits, “her background and subsequent procedural vicissitudes cannot be ignored,” which is why her prosecution should have been extended on the basis of the Santana Motor case.
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A year ago, the Isofoton case, in which 38 cases were investigated and which concerned the Andalusian government’s aid to the Málaga energy company of the same name, was annulled by the Sevillian court due to a defect in a similar way and the investigation was extended four months. Irregular in 2017. In this case, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office had identified the ministers María Jesús Montero and Luis Planas as former Andalusian advisers on health and agriculture, fisheries and environment, who granted aid worth 8.3 million to the company Isofoton in 2012, However, the investigation was stopped at short notice due to the legal deadlines for extending the investigation.
Juan Carlos Martínez’s company Job Management Liberty SL received funding from the company Experience Management Group SL, owned by his brother Bienvenido, who was president of Santana Motor between 2009 and 2011. After leaving the board, Bienvenido founded consulting and management companies that received 1.3 million in funding from the organizations where he previously served as a director. In addition, the investigation shows that Gámez’s husband received 128,880 euros from the pharmaceutical laboratories in Rovi, subsidized by the Idea agency, of which his brother Bienvenido was the director. Juan Carlos Martínez was director of the board companies Incuba, Soprea and Fagia in 2010 and 2011.
The lawyers Juan Carlos Alférez and Manuel Pérez Cuajares, from the law firm Constitución 23, Litigation Study, who have now won the appeal considered by the court, praise that the judges have shared their opinion that the case against Martínez is related to the previous one the one that was created, that of Santana Motor. “Instead of immediately creating a new separate part for this new object [la investigación contra Martínez]If its distribution is extended after the creation of the new piece, it is envisaged that the term counters will be reset to zero if this is a clear legal fraud.
In other words, the lawyers emphasize that the deadlines that an investigating judge must respect correspond to those of the original piece from which further investigations related to the first arise: “The contested decision contains a very interesting legal wording that supports the challenge that we propose “assumes.” in our resources specifies that when an instruction is split into individual parts, the initial expiration period is not that of the initiation of the new process, but rather that of the future of the parent part from which it originates, if this is the case “The object of the severed piece is already being examined within the matrix.”
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