Planned to be released at 12.30 on Monday the electoral list for Orihuela PP was finally presented by the party’s legal representative five hours late, in which it had retained José Vegara as number one despite the opening of an oral trial for a tax offense and falsehood in commercial declarations.
Throughout the afternoon, it had looked as though the regional management were insisting that Vegara resigned and that number three on the list, Víctor Valverde, moved up into the top position, however, although discussion went on into the late evening, Vegara was still retained as the candidate for mayor and the decision, at least for the time being, seemed firm.
Confirmation of the indictment by the Public Prosecutor, against Vegara and a number of other businessmen, which requests 7 years in prison for the PP candidate and possible future mayor of Orihuela, for alleged tax offenses and false commercial declarations had not made the PPCV leadership change its position.
Vegara and colleagues are accused, in 2005, of carrying out an operation, which would have seen 100,000 telephone books sold to clients of his company, Estación ITV, for 17 euros each when the market price was just 1.31 euro.
With this additional income, the company sought to falsify the profit data, thus reducing corporate tax, and declaring a fictitious amount of VAT. The prosecutor considers that the operation cost the Tax Agency an amount greater than 900,000 euros, which is why the prosecutor requests that Vegara and three other defendants also be sentenced to pay that amount to compensate the public budget.
The PP approach, certainly at the moment, is that it is a private matter, relating to a company owned by the candidate, which dates back to 2005 but which was recently reopened.
However, Vegara has given different versions of the events since they began to unfold last Friday. Initially, before his launch and major speech in Orihuela by national secretary Cuca Gamarra, he said that the case was closed in 2015, and that when the investigation was opened, in 2011, he had not been with the company because of a heart operation.
On the occasion of the presentation of his candidacy on Monday, Vegara admitted that the case was open, but has now attributed the Treasury investigation to “an error by an employee”. Minutes after these statements, the indictment from the Prosecutor’s Office was released, in which it stated that Vegara and three other people are directly identified as the architects of a plot to create false invoices and defraud the Treasury.
According to documents released by the Spanish press, the chief judge of court number three confirmed the charges in May 2022 and notified them in June of that same year; that is to say, that Vegara, or at least his defense, must have been aware of this fact before he was named, on 7 October 2022, as the candidate to lead the party into the 28M Municipal Elections.
