The Investigating Court 14 of Barcelona has imputed for alleged corruption seven positions of the Firefighters of the Generalitat, after finding evidence of bloated bills and commission payments of 2% in the maintenance service of the body’s vehicles.
As reported this Sunday by La Vanguardia, the person in charge of the contracting company in Catalonia, the Sevillian Iturri, Eduardo Jose Diaz, has also been charged in this case.
The judge has summoned to testify next Friday the director general of Fire Prevention and Extinction until last June, Manuel Pardo, and to his successor, Joan Delort.
The same information indicates that duplicate and even triplicate invoices have been found for repairs that were never carried out in firefighting trucks.
The head of the Fire Service technical service warned in April that the contract of the Grupo Iturri company no longer had a balance after compensating the budgeted deviation of the previous year in the first quarter, which closed with a debt of just over 1.7 million.
This situation forced an emergency meeting at the Ministry of the Interior with a lawyer from the department during which Manel Pardo defended his management and assured that the contract was “historically poorly dimensioned at an economic level”, for which the debt was piling up every year.
During the meeting, Pardo used a document in which he noted “+2%” while saying out loud “these are the invoices plus 2%”, and before the explanations that were asked of him, he added: “we cannot complain because before the amount to be paid was higher”, according to the newspaper.
The then minister, Miquel Samper, He commissioned confidential information from the general secretary of the department, Elisabet Abad, and after reading the report, he sent it to the Prosecutor’s Office.
The judge Miriam de Rosa He directed a secret investigation and authorized wiretapping and received several reports from the Mossos in which evidence of crimes appeared.
The lifting of the secret, at the end of December, coincided with the decision of the Interior to dismiss the chief intendant of the Mossos police station and investigation, Toni Rodríguez, and the departure of the head of the anti-corruption unit and author of the reports, the deputy inspector Juan Manuel Lazo.
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The case is open for alleged corruption and for a crime against public administration.
Iturri company, that has been implicated in other causes of corruption in other communities but has denied to the newspaper that it has billed for work that has not been done, provided the service during the last decade after offering better economic conditions, although the figures have shown a total expense That almost doubles the initial budget.