The TSJC considers proven that the suspended president of Parliament, Laura Borràs, split contracts during her time as president of the ILC to ensure that her friend Isaías Herrero benefited from them and not any other who aspired to provide these services under conditions of equality and free public competition. And that she acted “with full awareness that she was commissioning some work and producing a direct award that, regardless of the most elementary requirements for administrative contracting,” favored her friend Isaías Herrero. Consequently, she condemns her for a continued crime of falsifying an official document, as inducer of a continued crime of falsifying a commercial document and for a crime of administrative prevarication.
The sentence itself only includes a dissenting opinion that considers that he did not commit falsehood and that the disqualification should concern only positions with the power to contract. But also the magistrates whose criterion has been imposed incorporate into the ruling a clemency petition for Borràs related to part of the prison sentence that would mean, if granted, his non-entry into it. That a sentence includes a request for partial pardon is not an anomaly when the judge considers that the ruling cannot be another, even though the penalty may be disproportionate, but the fact that in a case like this surrounded by politics is still striking be justice itself the one that transfers to the political power the final decision on the sentence to meet. That same justice that the condemned considers partial and that political power that she considers abusive.
Although the sentence is not final, the ruling has immediate political implications. Borràs must cease as a deputy, and therefore, as president of the chamber, thus putting an end to an atypical interim situation that has been maintained since it was suspended last July as a result of the opening of the oral trial. However, his determination to consider this a political trial linked to the ‘procés’ and his reluctance to leave officeno matter how much the facts judged go back to a previous stage in which Borràs did not have an explicit political commitment and that the origin of the investigation was a fortuitous discovery by the Mossos, they do not augur an easy relief.
It will be the Electoral Board the one that ends up triggering his dismissal and his replacement will once again be the scene of a crossover of accusations between pro-independence parties exacerbated by the pre-electoral climate. But Laura Borràs’s political career can continue outside the institutions as president of Junts per Catalunya, clinging to a lax interpretation of her conviction as ‘lawfare’something that the party has incorporated into its heritage, although some of his colleagues, including Xavier Trias, candidate for mayor of Barcelona, have been asked for generosity with the party. A sector of it is aware that it makes no sense that the formation that has mutated to get rid of the stigma of corruption ends up having a condemned president for splitting contracts to favor a close person, no matter how much they want to dress up as repression. Terrible credentials that almost no one believes anymore, not even her own, which should define, since she does not, the personal interests and aspirations of the accused of the good of the formation that she presides over.