- Among those indicted are the former Popular Party mayors of Orihuela, José Manuel Medina and Mónica Lorente
The Supreme Court has partially upheld the appeal lodged by the Public Prosecutor against the sentence handed down by the Alicante Court of Appeals which acquitted the 34 defendants in the so-called ‘Brugal Case’, in which alleged irregularities in the awarding of the contract for waste collection and street cleaning in Orihuela were investigated.
The appealed judgment is annulled, and the case is returned to the court of origin for a new deliberation process and the drafting of another judgment, this time including the evidence that the Court had previously excluded on the grounds that it derived from invalid proceedings.
After analysing a large number of files, the phone taps agreed in the case from the start, and the records that the appealed sentence considered null, are now declared valid.
The Court explains that the Supreme Court’s case law recognises that the SITEL system (legal interception system for telecommunications), which is commonly used and was also used in this case, provides sufficient guarantees for the evidentiary validity of the phone tapping that use it. In this case, the authenticity was questioned, without any evidence being produced that would undermine the presumption of authenticity of the recordings.
In summary, some of the decisions adopted by the sentencing court were found to lack logical and rational support, which led to the expulsion of evidence that the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which acts as guarantor of legality and the public interest, proposed in defence of its claims. For this reason, the Supreme Court considers that the right of the public prosecution to effective judicial protection and to use the relevant means of proof has been violated.
In its appeal, the Prosecutor’s Office requested that the annulment be extended to the trial and requested that a new trial be held with another court. However, the Court rejected this request.
