Judicial aggravating factors are the circumstances that increase the criminal responsibility of a defendant and serve to apply a higher penalty. We are used to treachery, cruelty, and recidivism. Emiliano García-Page, president of the Junta of Castilla-La Mancha, and a thorn in the side of the PSOE, acts as both judge and party against Pedro Sánchez and applies “agosticity” to condemn any decision of the Government. “You have to have shamelessness,” he maintains, to pretend to process the financing reform with agosticity; the same that he attributes to the decision of the Council of Ministers to partially pardon Laura Borràs and three other convicts for crimes related to corruption.
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Page’s sharp verb serves to align him with the PP and gives more importance to the narrative than to the obligations of the Executive. On one hand, the financing system has been pending reform since 2014 and the Government’s proposal has been formally on the table of the autonomous communities since January without anyone proposing any alternative other than disqualification. On the other hand, more than three years have passed between the condemnation of Borràs, in which the TSJC recommended the pardon, and the Government’s decision, when the usual is not to exceed one year. More than agosticity, administrative negligence could be denounced. It is not management, they are political needs and they are delayed: to comply with a loyal investiture partner like ERC with financing and to clear that uncomfortable item from the agendas of the Council of Ministers that includes pending decisions.
Those who see in the pardon of Borràs a helping hand to Junts are mistaken in the Government and the PP. The disenchantment towards who was their president was prior to the conviction and, with the proven facts in the sentence – falsity and prevarication – she was shown the exit door. “They are not political crimes, they are common crimes,” the veteran Magda Oranich told her. Borràs never measured her strength within Junts and confused politics with Twitter applause.
The partial pardon of Borràs arrives at the same time as the Public Integrity bill. A regulation announced a year ago to “respond to the entire cycle of corruption” and which requires 18 legal reforms, six of them organic laws. A totum that, barring a parliamentary miracle, will lapse with the end of the legislature. What matters are the gestures, and the PP replies: it will present its plan against institutional degradation in September.
Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s plan is a total amendment to the PSOE’s anti-corruption plan and lacks historical memory. It responds to Sánchez’s pacts with the separatists: it reintroduces in the Penal Code the penalties for embezzlement that were eliminated by an agreement with ERC and modifies the pardon law – from 1870 – to prevent corruption crimes or attacks on the territorial integrity of the State from being pardoned.
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Page lamented the pardon of Borràs and two former socialist officials “with everything that is happening” about the PSOE. Since the socialists came to Government only one pardon related to corruption crimes had been agreed and it was for the whistleblower of Gürtel. The pardon meter forces going back to 2013, with Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón in the Ministry of Justice, to find eight pardons in corruption cases ranging from Málaga urban tricks to the Treball case in full collaboration with CiU.
The penthouse operation has many aggravating factors: recidivism, abuse of superiority…
However, the PP has shifted the focus and shoots less against Catalonia and more at corruption. It wants public audits on bailouts like that of Plus Ultra and to dismiss senior officials under judicial investigation. Goodbye to the presumption of innocence and cheers for judges who admit complaints sponsored by organizations with their own agenda based on headlines from online publications. Institutional regeneration would not come through efficient management, but through the continuous parade of officials in their positions.
Summer may help dilute the impact of uncomfortable Government decisions and blunders within the PP ranks, including the purchase of a penthouse for “meetings” of the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. An operation with many aggravating factors: recidivism, abuse of superiority and… agosticity.
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