• Public aid The husband (and brothers-in-law) of María Gámez: "unjust" enrichment in the shadow of the PSOE
  • Isofoton Case The judge files for an error in the instruction the 'Isofoton case', which splashed three ministers of Sánchez

The investigation that keeps open the Court of Instruction 6 of Seville for the alleged plot mounted by the husband of the former director of the Civil Guard and his brothers to enrich themselves using, supposedly, their contacts in the Board is not the only case of alleged corruption with which Juan Carlos Martínez is connected.

Accused of embezzlement, prevarication and money laundering, Martínez held for years positions of responsibility in ministries and public companies dependent on the Junta de Andalucía and the same, even at a higher level, his brother, Bienvenido, who became a director of the IDEA Agency, the epicenter of the largest corruption case in the history of Andalusia, that of the ERE. The suspicion of the investigators of the UDEF (Economic and Fiscal Crimes Unit) of the National Police is that the three brothers – Bienvenido, Juan Carlos and the third, Manuel – profited "unfairly" by charging from companies that, in turn, had received substantial aid from the regional administration and that, in some way, could have been a charge for putting their influences at their service.

One of those companies came to hire Gámez's husband as an advisor and connects him with one of the great cases of corruption uncovered in recent years in the community in relation to the PSOE governments. Isofoton, which was the name of the company, paid Juan Carlos Martínez more than 21,000 euros – exactly 21,789 euros – in 2012 through one of its subsidiaries, Isofoton Power Generation SL, after receiving "huge" amounts of public money for almost a decade from the Board and, more specifically, from the IDEA Agency. of which his brother was a director.

The quotation marks are from the UDEF investigators who, in their latest report to the court (the one that has caused the imputation of Martínez), highlight the flow of public funds that the Andalusian socialist governments injected into Isofoton in the form of direct aid and credit guarantees and that were granted in an allegedly irregular way.

Those aids, which exceeded 80 million euros, gave rise to the opening of another investigation in another court, that of Instruction 3 of Seville, in which three former socialist counselors were charged, Martín Soler, Manuel Recio and Francisco Vallejo, precisely for whom Juan Carlos Martínez worked for years as his chief of staff.

Exonerated by default of form

But, in addition, that case splashed three ministers of the executive of Pedro Sánchez, namely, María Jesús Montero, Luis Planas and Teresa Rribera. The first two were part, as directors at that time of the Board, of the delegate commission that granted the aid to Isofoton, and the vice president and minister of Ecological Transition because between September 2012 and May 2013 she was general director of Strategic Development and New International Markets of the photovoltaic company based in Malaga. Also among the accused was Gamez's brother-in-law, Bienvenido Martínez.

A formal defect in the processing of the procedure led to its archiving and the exoneration of all of them without criminal responsibilities being settled. It happened in October of last year after the investigating judge extended the investigation after the deadline. The decision was made by a different magistrate than the one who initiated the investigation and, previously, she refused to file the case for this same reason, claiming that it would be a kind of "general pardon" and underlining the "loss to the public treasury".

In its report on the business of Gámez's husband and brothers-in-law, the UDEF points out, in fact, that the brother-in-law of the former director of the armed institute participated in the decision-making of these funds and maintains the hypothesis that the more than 21,000 euros that the husband received were, in reality, "some kind of remuneration for the granting of said aid."

The former counselor Antonio Ávila, with Ángel Luis Serrano, from Affirma, and Lee Jae Hwan, from Top Tech, after closing the purchase of Isofoton.CARLOS DÍAZ

Public money was lost and the Malaga company ended up in ruin and sold, for the symbolic price of one euro, to two partners with the blessing of the Board. 80% went to the company Affirma Abogados and the remaining 20% to a South Korean partner, Top Tec, in 2010.

Juan Carlos Martínez himself admitted to the judge that he is investigating the charges of Isofoton and gave more details. According to his explanation, he had contact with Affirma, although he specifies that he knows the firm "when he no longer has any responsibility in the Junta de Andalucía" and that the signing was due not to the influences he could have, but to his "experience in the foreign market, mainly China". So much so that, he added, he is hired to develop the business in the Asian country "contributing to the search for new markets and business location, consulting related to clients of the law firm Affirma, strategy for presence in forums and conferences, informative monitoring and responses to the media, etc. ".

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  • UDEF
  • Seville
  • Civil Guard
  • Pedro Sanchez
  • Maria Jesus Montero
  • Luis Planas
  • Malaga
  • PSOE
  • National Police
  • Corruption
  • Articles Chema Rodríguez