The last bench of Francisco Camps

• Politics Francisco Camps resigns from his only public position and returns to the legal profession

Francisco Camps was forced to leave active politics in July 2011 and face a judicial cascade of accusations in alleged cases of corruption that occurred during his years in the presidency of the

The first of them, the so-called

, sat him on the bench at the beginning of 2012. Eleven years later, today, January 23, 2023, the former president will be tried again, this time by the Second Section of the Chamber Criminal Court of the National Court.

It will be the last time that the popular appears before a court.

Camps is facing a request from the Prosecutor's Office for two and a half years in prison, and disqualification for any job or public office for ten years, for alleged crimes of prevarication and fraud against the administration in the award to

, the subsidiary of

in

directed by

, from the stand of the Valencian Community for the 2009 edition of Fitur.

Along with him will be three of his former ministers,

,

and

, -all separated from politics, face disqualification sentences of seven to nine years- and more than a dozen technicians and positions of the

.

Many of them, like the ringleaders of the plot, have reached agreements with the Prosecutor's Office to recognize the crimes they are accused of.

Anticorruption considers that Camps ordered, through the General Directorate for Institutional Promotion, that the construction of the stand be entrusted to the

companies "without processing the contracting procedure and without respecting the principles of transparency, publicity and competition."

The thesis of the Prosecutor's Office is that this last award was made to compensate the debt of 800,000 euros that the PPCV had with

since the 2007 elections.

Camps will go back to court to avoid the last conviction request, because he has been exonerated from the rest of the trials and procedures.

The first one who sat him on the bench cost him the presidency of the Generalitat Valenciana and his political life.

In 2008 he was accused of having committed a crime of "improper bribery" by accepting some suits allegedly given away by the

Despite the fact that he presented himself already investigated to the regional authorities in May 2011 and obtained an absolute majority, in July, at the gates of the trial, he submitted his resignation.

Months later, a popular jury acquitted him as it was not proven who paid for the garments or that there was a direct relationship between the alleged gifts and the award of contracts to Correa's companies by the Generalitat.

Later he was involved in a string of processes in which no evidence of crime was found despite being pointed out both by the Prosecutor's Office and by the defendants themselves, in what he has always considered a "daily and millimeter obsession, chasing me on land, sea ​​and air.

After the cause of the suits, came the Anti-Corruption request that he be accused of embezzlement, prevarication, fraud and influence peddling in the

for his intervention in the negotiations with the

institute to organize the

event and the

Judge

forwarded the petition to the Valencian Supreme Court, which returned it to

, finding no evidence of crime in

or in

.

In fact, the High Court described his meetings with the then Duke of Palma as "protocol or courtesy".

The pact with the Public Prosecutor who was his right hand in the PP, the former general secretary

, and

, brought him back to court for the irregular financing of the Valencian PP between 2007 and 2011. He appeared as a witness, but was named as the person most responsible for the main defendants.

In the 2018 sentence, which condemns

and three other party charges, the magistrate states that it is "legally impossible to issue any pronouncement" nor can "not even a mere value judgment" be made about Camps' conduct, in addition to the fact that As these were events from 2007 and he had not been accused at any time, the alleged crime would have prescribed.

The name of the former Valencian president was also linked to the process that was followed in 2014 against the architect

for alleged irregularities in relation to the construction project of the Castellón Convention Center.

himself

was the one who pointed to

as the man who asked him for an "iconic building" for the city at a cost of 180 million euros.

The case was filed "as there is no evidence of alleged crimes, only indications."

Two of the great events that marked their governments became another legal headache: Formula 1 and the visit of

to Valencia in 2006.

In the case of motoring, the former president was implicated in two causes.

The first, already archived, was opened due to the alleged irregularities in the contracts for the construction of the urban circuit.

In this case, the former president had the support of the

's Office , which did not consider the embezzlement or prevarication with which he was accused to be accredited after the Intervention of the Generalitat considered that there was no economic damage to the

The second also ended up in a drawer and was related to the decision of the Valencian Government to replace Bancaja as guarantor of Valmor, the company created expressly for the organization of the great prizes.

This decision was made by the Council chaired by Camps one day before presenting his resignation and, in the course of the case, the Intervention of the

clarified that this maneuver cannot legally be considered as an endorsement, since it does not guarantee an operation of credit, so it is not outside the administrative legality.

The two cases related to the Pope's visit to Valencia have also ended in the archive.

Despite not being charged in the process detached from

that was followed in the

Camps appeared as a witness and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor asked that "false testimony" be deducted from his story, a request that did not go ahead either.

Dismissed also ended the one that spattered him for the contracts made to prepare the visit of Benedict XVI.

The

did not see "any element that would allow us to sustain" the accusations against the former president based on the agreements adopted by the Valencian Government in the years 2005, 2009, 2010 and 2014. "After five years of investigations, no Demonstrated that certain contractors would have been favored through the contracts," the order stated.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more