The lawyer played by emma thompson in the film ‘In the name of the father’, directed by the Irishman Jim Sheridan in 1993, she watched stupefied as after the umpteenth consultation of the public file of her defendants -the four from Guilford-, a note attached to one of the documents warned: “Don’t teach defense”which allowed him to turn the situation around and win the case.
The same stupefaction must have felt a resident of the west of Madrid who for years lawsuit with the City Council of the capital for an expropriation that affects his farm in the Valdemarín area and that, after several vicissitudes, he managed to access the municipal offices on February 1 to consult his file. What was his surprise when, stuck to the folder, a blue post-it indicated: “Important. If the expropriated come to see the file (their names are listed below), remove the folders from the file before they see it”.
The neighbor showed his complaint to the officials, who looked at each other without knowing very well how to react, called the Police to raise the crowd and the matter gave rise to a complaint in the guard court that has fallen on de Instruction number 25 of Madridaccording to sources in the case to El Periódico de España, a newspaper belonging to the same group, Prensa Ibérica, as this newspaper.
Crime of up to four years in prison
Lawyer Jose Antonio Garcia-Trevijano filed a complaint for possible crime of coercion and concealment and manipulation picked up in the article 413 of the Penal Code, that punishes the authority or public official “who knowingly steals, destroys, disables or hides, totally or partially, documents whose custody is entrusted to him”. The penalty for this crime is between one to four years in prison plus a fine.
The neighbor has been suing for years over the expropriation of land on Valdesquí street in Madrid where a school is located Mater Salvatoriswhich has an access street that the Supreme Court itself, in a ruling issued in June 2013, ruled was incompatible with road safety. It is, according to his lawyer, a matter in which a alleged scam to his client that he would exceed the three million euros.
After getting an appointment to see the file, the neighbor agreed to the Registration Assistance Officebelonging to Urban Development Government Area of the Madrid City Council. There, an official took him to a closed office, instead of the open place where other citizens took a look at the files, and together with another worker from the City Council he handed him volume by volume.
“They sat in front of him like watchmen. They did not give a convincing answer to his question about why he could not see the file in the place normally enabled for it, as everyone was doing, “says the complaint to which this newspaper has had access.
From the beginning, the affected found anomalies in the paperssuch as the fact that there were pages whose numbering was crossed out with typex and renumbered, as well as the existence of unnumbered pages. But the surprise came when it was delivered the third volume and open its first page. On the left, a blue sticky paper was attached to the file on which the warning against him and the order to remove part of the documents were written by hand.
After a struggle in which an attempt was made to prevent the citizen from photographing the note The National Police was called, who gave an account of its contents in a statement. “The issue affects an expropriation in which several million euros are discussed, and everything points to that the City Council is of course hiding -and perhaps manipulating- the file”adds the complaint. According to the lawyer, it is a right of the interested party to know the public documentation that affects him and from which he can extract as much data as he needs.
Among the steps requested by the complainants, which will be completed if the complaint is admitted for processing, is the contribution by the City Council of the post-it with the handwritten note, which orders the National Police to send a copy of the report or steps practiced in the municipal offices and the statement as witnesses of officials present on the day of the incident.
In addition to the complaint, after what happened, the neighbor formally requested an appointment with the Councilor for Town Planning, whose office replied that it was passing the matter to general director of urban management, Jesús Pascual, who has not replied to this day. He also asked for clarification on the content of the file and to identify the author of the notealso unanswered for now from the Madrid City Council.