The former president of the Valencian Generalitat Francisco Camps testified this Tuesday at the National Court as a defendant in the Gürtel trial on the awarding of a stand in Fitur to the plot. The popular politician, who is being asked by the Prosecutor’s Office for two and a half years in prison, has been the subject of a tense, often chaotic interrogation with the Anti-Corruption prosecutor.
The prosecutor’s questions were aimed at demonstrating Camps’s relationship with Gürtel’s man in Valencia, Álvaro Pérez, the Mustache. The former president’s responses have minimized this relationship and have pointed to the national leadership of the PP as responsible for hiring companies in the plot.
Camps has described Álvaro Pérez as a “stagehand for PP acts” with whom he had “a political relationship, not a personal one”. “I never had a coffee with Álvaro Pérez, nor ate with him, he was never at my house, nor did we go on a trip, nor did we have any kind of personal relationship, nor did we walk down the street, nor did we go to a garden,” he stated. .
Prosecutor Concepción Nicolás has shown him several photographs in which Bigotes and Camps appeared. The former president has dispatched them indicating that they only reflect that they were in the same party act, but nothing more. “Didn’t you know who was doing the acts?”, he has asked himself. “Yes, it was Álvaro Pérez, I will never deny that, but through which business body, I did not know. I have never known how he was hired.”
“So, was your campaign determined?” The prosecutor insisted. “Yes, from the national campaign committee. The PP is a completely centralized party. The one who leads the campaign of the candidates for president of autonomous communities is the national leadership of the PP. Everything is prepared from the national leadership. I had neither no idea which company was in charge. “Didn’t he have anything to say, nothing to say about his campaign?” The prosecutor has returned. “Look at me, I have not worried about my image in life.”
An inevitable episode of the interrogation was a conversation between Pérez and Camps in which several “I love you very much” intersect and the president calls him a “soul friend.” Camps began by setting the context: that it was Christmas (2008, two months after the Gürtel case broke out) and that he had come from Madrid “exultant” to get new financing. “Due to the hour, I must have already been at my parents’ house finishing the calls. Ricardo Costa asked me to call Álvaro Pérez because we had had a very nice regional congress and he and I had organized it and I thanked him that way after that feeling of having achieved something great for the Valencian Community, on Christmas Eve, a call of these characteristics… I don’t know why it got mad, but hey, life is like that”.
Camps, who has thrown more questions at the prosecutor than she has received, recalled that he has already been acquitted nine times for reasons related to Gürtel. And he has taken advantage of the part of the conversation in which he responds to the grateful Álvaro Pérez that he owes him “nothing” to affirm that he feels “free”. “The best thing is absolute freedom, that’s why I’m here free, happy, extremely free. I’m free of any kind of slavery with anyone in this world and certainly with all these people.”
The defendant had less relationship than with Bigotes with the head of the Gürtel plot, the multi-condemned Francisco Correa. The prosecutor began the interrogation by asking when she had met him. “The first time in my life that I have evidence of having met Francisco Correa was outside this room the day he came to testify. […] When the photographs of this man came out [in 2009, when he was arrested] I didn’t even know I didn’t even know about his existence,” Camps said, adding a reference to the recent incident on the day when Correa declared: “The other day here, and I apologize, I approached him and said ‘I don’t want any harm to you or for anyone, but it seems unbelievable to me that due to agreements with the Prosecutor’s Office you are lying in this way, because you and I don’t know each other at all'”.
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