The former president of Murcia Ramón Luis Valcárcel, of the Popular Party, who presided over the autonomous community between 1995 and 2014, will sit on the bench accused of alleged crimes of prevarication, embezzlement and fraud of subsidies in the construction and subsequent management of a desalination plant in 2006. The Provincial Court of Murcia has notified this Thursday the opening of an oral trial, which will not be held until September 2027, 21 years after the events that are going to be judged. Valcárcel He will face sentences of 11 years in prison.
The Superior Court of Justice of Murcia has explained in a statement that this great delay in setting the opening date of the trial is due to the fact that at least 21 sessions will be required and the agenda of Section 3, which is what will lead to carried out the procedure, “it is occupied until June 2027.” Thus, the trial will start on September 15, 2027, and will last until November 9 of that same year, and more than 80 witnesses will pass through it and different expert tests will be carried out.
The Provincial Court had already scheduled the holding of this trial for last July and had demanded that the former president pay a bail of 74 million euros to avoid the seizure of his assets, a decision against which Valcárcel presented allegations, while at the same time advancing his intention not to accept a conformity agreement and defend his innocence, which forced the procedure to be suspended a month before it was held. After setting the new date, the TSJ recalls that “due to the high volume of pending trial procedures” accumulated by the Provincial Court, the State was requested to create a new criminal section. Instead, and as a temporary solution, two years ago two reinforcement magistrates were assigned to the TSJ “to try to alleviate the delays in the prosecution of complex cases.” With this reinforcement, Section 3 of the Court has been working for the last two years “in split form, as if it were two bodies.”
The delay in the procedures of the Provincial Court of Murcia has raised controversy on previous occasions, the last one being last September, when the procedure was carried out against 13 people who had participated in a minor prostitution plot ten years earlier. , in 2014. These delays have led to the application of a mitigating circumstance in the degree of “very qualified” which meant a significant reduction in sentences, so that finally only three of the thirteen convicted will go to jail.
Former president Valcárcel, who was also president of the Committee of the Regions of the European Union between 2012 and 2014, faces in this procedure penalties totaling 11 years in prison, 20 of absolute disqualification and another 27 of special disqualification for employment or office. public for crimes of continued prevarication, continuing fraud and embezzlement of public funds, according to the requests of the Prosecutor’s Office. The Public Ministry considers that the way in which the construction of that desalination plant, which is located in the Escombreras Valley, in Cartagena, and its subsequent sale was managed, generated significant extra costs that the public administration assumed. The plant was built under a public-private collaboration formula in which the public part was represented by the Public Water Entity, which was created expressly for that purpose, and the private part, by a conglomerate of local companies called Hydromanagement and by companies of the ACS Group. It was planned that the construction would be self-financing with the profits from its operation, but in 2011 the autonomous community was forced to assume a ransom of 600 million euros. The prosecutor considers that Valcárcel knew the financial situation of the plant, which was one of his personal bets during his mandate, and that it has never been able to operate at full capacity since It opened in 2007.
For the public ministry, the public part bought shares of the plant “detaching the private part from the ruin of the project” and generating economic damage to the public treasury for the benefit of private companies that would amount to 74 million euros, the same amount that was imposed on the former president as bail. This judicial procedure, popularly known as “La Sal II”, is a separate piece of another procedure opened previously in relation to the same desolation, “La Sal I”.
Valcárcel will be the second president of the Region of Murcia to pass the bench. The first was his successor in office, Pedro Antonio Sánchez, against whom various corruption cases were pending during his time as mayor, and who He was sentenced in March 2023 to three years in prison and 17 years of disqualification for rigging a tender to award the construction works of an auditorium in Puerto Lumbreras.
