Electoral board gives parliament 10 days to determine speaker Borràs' status following corruption sentence

The electoral board has given the Catalan parliament 10 business days to determine suspended speaker Laura Borràs' status following her four-and-a-half-year prison sentence and 13-year disqualification for corruption. 

This means chamber bureau vice president, Alba Vergés of Esquerra Republicana, who has been acting as speaker since Borràs was suspended last summer, will have to inform the electoral board of any parliamentary "decisions, resolutions or any other measures" that are taken by April 27, as was announced on Thursday.

Former far-left pro-independence CUP MP Pau Juvillà was stripped of his seat following the same procedure in January 2022, with the electoral board eventually ordering him to be removed from his post, as was the case with ex-Catalan president Quim Torra, of Borràs' party, Junts per Catalunya, in early 2020. 

The electoral board cites the precedents set by the Juvillà and Torra cases as both politicians were stripped of their positions in Parliament before the Supreme Court handed down a decision on their appeals. 

It also cites article 6.2 b of the LOREG electoral law, which states that anyone who has been convicted of "rebellion, terrorism, crimes against the public administration or state institutions" and barred from office is ineligible for a public post even if their sentence can still be appealed. 

Corruption sentence

The deadline comes exactly two weeks after Borràs was found guilty of helping a friend secure public contracts during her time at the head of the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC) and sentenced to 4.5 years behind bars with a 13-year disqualification from public office.

Despite this Catalan High Court ruling, Borràs remains free as the sentence will be appealed before the Supreme Court, where it will have to be upheld for her to be imprisoned. It could still take months for her to learn the outcome of the appeals process.

The High Court ruling itself also opens the door to a partial pardon as it asks the Spanish government to lower her sentence to 2 years, thereby avoiding prison time as a first-time offender of financial crimes in accordance with Spanish legislation. 

This legal mechanism is used when the court understands that it must impose a certain penalty, but at the same time, considers it excessive, in this case, because "it does not allow for sentence reduction procedures."

Splitting contracts to avoid tenders

Between March 2013 and February 2017, the ILC awarded, "through its director," 18 minor contracts relating to its website, for a total value of €330,000. 

Borràs "intervened" by "proposing and awarding the contract, approving the expenditure, certifying the execution of the service, issuing the corresponding invoice and finally authorizing the payment," according to the High Court judges. 

Of these contracts, six were awarded to Isaías Herrero for a total of €112,500 and one to Andreu Pujol for €20,050. Six contracts were also awarded to Xarxa Integral for €101,035 and three to Freelance for €54,437, two groups Isaías Herrero was a member of.

Although the contracts amounted to a total of €330,000, the ILC paid out €309,000 in the end. 

Shortly after having been appointed director of the ILC, Borràs introduced Isaías Herrero to the staff as head of the website. The two exchanged emails about invoices and contracts, concluding that the same vendor could not file invoices for different items in the same year and that they, therefore, had to "knock on doors" to bill different names and to avoid exceeding the €18,000 maximum for minor contracts.

At the time, public contracts in Catalonia of over €18,000 had to be put to tender. The court found that Borràs fraudulently split a larger payment into smaller contracts in order to be able to select who would be awarded the work and to avoid a public tender process.