Former accountant says Pepe Vegara and two fellow administrators held decision-making power when the alleged €488,000 corporate tax fraud took place
A former accountant at the Vega Baja vehicle inspection station told the Orihuela Criminal Court on Friday that the company’s three joint administrators — including Pepe Vegara, now mayor of Orihuela — held the main decision-making power at the time of the alleged tax fraud.
Vegara, who is also Orihuela City Council’s finance councillor, sat on the company’s board of directors in 2005 alongside two other partners, years before entering politics. He is now standing trial on allegations of tax fraud and falsification of commercial documents.
The prosecution has opposed a defense request to dismiss the case on due-process grounds. Judge Sacramento Ruiz Bosch has scheduled two further hearings, with the trial set to resume on June 2 and conclude on June 12.
In its preliminary filing, the Public Prosecutor’s Office sought a seven-year prison sentence for Vegara, three other company-linked defendants, and an intermediary. That request may be reduced once final conclusions are submitted, after a new Tax Inspectorate report recalculated the alleged losses to the Treasury.
The recalculation follows the exclusion from the case of alleged fictitious liabilities involving invoices for services not rendered. Defense lawyers are also expected to argue that the proceedings have suffered excessive delays, given that the trial is taking place 16 years after the investigation began.
Even so, the prosecutor warned that the new figures would not substantially alter the legal classification of the alleged conduct, except potentially in relation to penalties.
At the opening session, the State Attorney’s Office, representing the interests of the Public Treasury, submitted a new tax-inspection report that nearly halved the alleged amount defrauded. The case now focuses on an alleged corporate tax loss of €488,000, down from an initial estimate of €917,000.
According to prosecutors, the company allegedly inflated expenses through the purchase of 100,000 promotional planners. The company was billed €17 for each planner, despite the actual value being just over €1. Prosecutors argue that the aim was to reduce the company’s declared profit for the 2005 financial year and thereby avoid paying corporate tax.
The quantity ordered was also described as grossly disproportionate, exceeding the registered population of the municipality by many thousands.
Friday’s hearing centered on testimony from a former administrator and head of accounting at the company, who worked there from the early 2000s until 2007. He told the court that the board of joint administrators proposed and approved promotional campaigns designed to attract customers to the Vega Baja ITV station.
The station, located in the San Carlos district and now managed by the Generalitat Valenciana, faced competition from inspection centres in the Region of Murcia and from the ITV station in San Bartolomé. The witness cited annual promotional campaigns involving planners, telephone directories, reflective vests, and sunshades, which he said were successful in drawing in customers.
Asked by the prosecution who requested these promotional activities, the witness clearly identified the board of directors, including Vegara.
His testimony contradicted that of another company employee, the sister of one of the defendants. The former accountant said the company’s founder and former head of legal services could propose ideas and offer opinions, but that Vegara and the other administrators were the ones who “made the decisions” and debated matters at board meetings.
That statement became one of the key moments of the session, shifting the courtroom focus from whether tax fraud occurred to who held responsibility for the decisions under scrutiny.
The hearing also featured testimony from witnesses called by the State Attorney’s Office. One witness said the company’s former head of legal services, who died in 2025, had “set up” a company for him in exchange for money so that invoices could be issued in its name.
“They set up that company for me, and in the end I found out that invoices had been issued in my name,” the witness said. “An employee there told me invoices had been issued, so I went to the Tax Agency in Alicante and filed a complaint.”
However, because the alleged fictitious liabilities have been removed from the scope of the trial, that line of questioning was quickly curtailed. The witness’s testimony nevertheless highlighted inconsistencies between his profile and what would normally be expected of a company manager. The State Attorney’s Office later waived testimony from another witness with a similar background.
A significant part of the hearing was devoted to preliminary objections raised by the defense at the start of the trial. Prosecutors and the State Attorney’s Office firmly rejected claims that the investigation should be annulled because of alleged due-process violations.
The prosecution argued that the investigation, launched after a 2010 tax audit was referred to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was valid from the outset. It maintained that the alleged offenses were not time-barred because a sufficiently reasoned court order in January 2011 interrupted the statute of limitations that began in 2005.
The prosecutor also said that, although there may have been an administrative limitation issue concerning the first quarter of 2005, there was no criminal statute-of-limitations bar.
One of the defense’s central complaints was that the tax documentation underpinning the charges had allegedly been absent from the case file throughout the investigation. Prosecutors and the State Attorney’s Office rejected that claim, stating that the complete file, including the inspection report, appeared on page 12 of the first volume of the proceedings, on a CD containing 120 investigation-related documents.
The alleged absence of that documentation had prompted the defense to request both suspension and annulment of the proceedings. Judge Ruiz Bosch said the preliminary issues would be assessed at the sentencing stage, a decision protested by lawyers for the five defendants. One defense attorney argued that the objections should have led to the suspension of the hearing.
Scheduling conflicts involving remaining witnesses and experts forced the postponement of the next planned session. The court will now hear the third session on June 2, followed by a fourth and final session on June 12.
Beyond the technical tax arguments still to come, the first two sessions have underscored a politically significant fact: Vegara knew before being selected as the Partido Popular candidate for mayor that the case against him had not been closed.
Although the proceedings began in 2010, the Provincial Court reopened the case in 2015. In 2021 and 2022, further court orders and rulings were still being issued. By the time Vegara entered the mayoral race, the case was not dormant — it was moving toward a trial that, according to the record now before the court, he knew was still very much alive.
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