Puig's brother admits duplicate invoices to apply for subsidies from Valencia and Catalonia

• Ximo Puig "If there are irregularities, compensation will be requested"

The brother of the president of the Generalitat, Ximo Puig, has come out this Monday from the almost total anonymity he enjoyed to date.

The businessman

has had to appear before the judge for the first time as investigated for alleged irregularities in obtaining public subsidies, in a case initiated at the request of a PP complaint that is the first case of alleged corruption that directly splashes the environment of the socialist president.

Even the hiring of his son in the company of his uncle Francis is part of the

report that the businessman has tried to dismantle before the judge.

This report served the

's Office to request the indictment of the president's brother, accused of a crime of subsidy fraud and false documentation.

The Civil Guard, in fact, came to analyze four types of irregularities committed by the companies of Francis Puig (

and

brothers

(

), in a plot allegedly staged to hunt all kinds of public aid, especially those to promote Valencian, between 2015 and 2018, that is, once Ximo Puig arrived at the

.

In his statement in the Court of Instruction number 4 of Valencia, Francis Puig has however recognized the existence of duplicate invoices, as the Civil Guard initially pointed out and have confirmed different legal sources present in the statement.

After an interrogation that lasted four hours, the audiovisual businessman's own lawyer, Javier Falomir, explained that "in some cases the same invoices were provided in Valencia and Catalonia", since they opted for subsidies to promote the language in media.

"Does it mean that we allocate 100% of the spending to both? No. Then the Administration decides what it subsidizes and what it doesn't," Falomir insisted.

In this sense, the defense of the president's brother has derived the responsibility to the Generalitat itself, which "when it decides, never says what expenses it attributes to the subsidy".

That is to say, when the employer does not know if what the Valencian Administration subsidizes corresponds to payroll or current expenditure, for example, when he then requests aid from

, he "contributes everything".

In his statement, Francis blamed the Generalitat for not informing him of the alleged errors, according to the sources consulted.

"The Civil Guard does not understand how this works", the lawyer has justified, to question the content of the report that places Francis Puig at the center of a plot that captured 1.2 million public money from the Valencian and Catalan governments.

Falomir goes so far as to say that the Civil Guard exceeded its limits in its work when "it drops pearls that have no value and that could have been saved".

In this sense, Francis Puig's defense will wait for the reports from the

to request the dismissal of the case, which he described as "unfortunate", implicitly pointing to an alleged political bias.

Francis Puig holds that the amounts allegedly defrauded do not exceed 120,000 euros, which is the amount required by the criminal type of subsidy fraud.

It is hoped, therefore, that the case will end up revolving solely around the crime of falsehood, so that in the next few days all the required documentation will be presented.

However, legal sources suggest that Francis Puig has left the ball in the court of

, the general director of Language Policy also investigated in this case.

And this because the employer has stressed that the Generalitat never warned him of anything wrong in justifying the subsidies, so he has never been asked to return any amount.

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