Suspended parliament speaker testifies: Contracts were approved by auditors

The suspended speaker of the Catalan parliament, Laura Borràs, testified in court on Monday that contracts awarded during her time as director of the Institute of Catalan Letters (ILC) were processed without objections by the institute's administrative heads and accepted by auditors at the Department of Culture. 

The corruption trial is focused on 18 minor contracts awarded to Isaías Herrero, an IT expert who last week confessed to faking quotes under Borràs's orders, although the parliament speaker denies all charges. 

Borràs said that Herrero was a "digital artist", not just an IT specialist, and the various contracts awarded to him were for different projects, although all related to the ILC website. She thereby reaffirmed in court that she never breached the law of public contracts as head of the ILC, a public body in charge of promoting Catalan literature.

After her interrogation at the Catalan High Court (TSJC), Borràs said she was a victim of "political persecution." 

"Correct, legal and resonable"

Borràs, who chose to respond only to her lawyer, answered questions for approximately one hour and 40 minutes. 

She said that public bodies must work efficiently and effectively to have the best quality of service, within the shortest timeframes and with the best price possible. 

Borràs therefore thought of Herrero to help with a major push towards the digitization of the ILC. She denied that she considered having Herrero on the payroll or making him a covert employment contract. "I needed his expertise for a digital project," the Junts president told the judge. 

Her work as the head of the ILC was "correct, legal and perfectly reasonable, done with the criteria set by the administration," Borràs said. 

"Not even in my wildest nightmares could I have imagined that I would be investigated for crimes I did not commit," she added. 

Herrero incriminates friend Borràs 

Herrero, a friend of  Borràs, confessed to splitting contracts to avoid public tenders last Monday during the ongoing corruption trial on the matter, thus incriminating the politician.

Herrero, alongside Andreu Pujol and Borràs, is also accused by the public prosecutor's office of wrongdoing, and has been negotiating a deal with the public attorney to incriminate himself and Borràs in order to avoid imprisonment, as he faces a six-year sentence and a €72,000 fine.

During his testimony, Herrero explained that the contracts did not surpass €18,000 as this way they would not need to be put to a public tender, according to the legislation at the time.

"We would hand out three different quotes for each contract, and we would write them so there would be two quotes accompanying the quote that we knew would end up being accepted, so we created fake quotations," Isaías Herrero said to the judge.

He said he was the person that created these quotes after asking Borràs the names of the companies that would be used to write the fake quotes, as seen in some private email exchanges between the two.

In some cases, the suspended parliament speaker proposed writing some of these contracts, but the IT expert wrote the quotations himself.

Borràs faces up to six years in prison and could be barred from office for 21 years and fined €144,000 as per the public prosecutor’s request, which was made public in July 2022, a few days before the parliament suspended her from her post.

The trial is set to last until March 1 and will have seven sessions in total.

Borràs and Herrero are accused of administrative fraud, and the judge has also accused the politician of an administrative breach of official duty, falsification of a commercial document, and misuse of public funds. However, the public prosecutor did not accuse Borràs of misuse of public funds as there are no documents certifying that the suspended parliament speaker paid an additional amount for the requested work.

Third co-defendant

The third co-defendant in the Laura Borràs trial briefly responded to the public prosecutor and his lawyer's questions last Monday after acknowledging to the judge the veracity of the prosecution's indictment. 

Andreu Pujol was aware that the contracts were split up to "violate the public tender legislation." 

He also knew that the quotations that he submitted would be "selected," and he wrote the text that Isaías Herrero told him to in the quote. In some cases, the works done were "completely different, some real and some not," to what was written in the quotes.

The money he received was used to pay the staff working on the project, and he kept a small amount as a coordination fee.

Accused of splitting contracts to avoid tenders

Between March 2013 and February 2017, the ILC awarded, "through its director," 18 minor contracts related to its website, for a total value of €330,000, in which Borràs "intervened", "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 judge's decree published on March 14, 2022.

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 the Xarxa Integral for €101,035 and three to Freelance for €54,437, two groups Isaías Herrero was a member of.

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

Shortly after being appointed director of the ILC, Borràs introduced Isaías Herrero to the staff as head of the organization's website. The two exchanged emails, according to the judge, 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 invoice under different names 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 alleges that Borràs fraudulently split a larger payment into smaller contracts in order to be able to choose who would be awarded the work to avoid putting it to public tender.