The mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, will not be able to avoid testifying before a judge on March 4th, following today's decision by a Barcelona investigating court to reject the appeal lodged by the mayor's defence lawyer against the admission for hearing of the complaint accusing her of alleged offences of abuse of authority, fraud in contracting, misuse of public funds, influence peddling and illegal negotiations, following a complaint filed by a group known as the Association for Transparency and Democratic Quality. According to the Barcelona city council, the judge has accepted the complaint for processing and, therefore, Colau's summons is confirmed.
In fact, council sources have stated that from the first day both the mayor and the municipal legal services, working in collaboration with lawyers Olga Tubau and Alex Solà, have been working with the certainty that the testimony will take place on 4th March, and for this reason, the legal team wanted to go ahead and send eight technical reports to the court, so that the judge will have all the necessary information before the statement, believing it highly likely that the case will then be dropped. However, according to the newspaper El Mundo, and as confirmed by elNacional.cat, the judge's ruling today classifies the submission presented as an "exculpatory statement" which should be made during the appearance in March.
Therefore, in the face of this rejection by the judge, Colau will have to testify on March 4th at 10:30am to answer the questions regarding the complaint made against her, in which she is accused of giving her assent arbitrarily, at her own discretion and repeatedly, without public knowledge and without justifying the public interest, to a series of grants and financial agreements with the sole purpose of financing the work positions, activities and operation of various entities related to her political party, Barcelona en Comú. The complaint points to organizations such as the Observatorio DESC (where Colau worked before becoming mayor), Engineers Without Borders, the PAH housing action platform (for which the current mayor was spokesperson) and the Alliance against Energy Poverty.
Although the mayor of Barcelona announced a broad willingness to cooperate with justice, confident that the complaint would turn out to be "nothing", she then filed an appeal against the admission of the suit to avoid having to testify before the judge. Colau has always argued that an earlier case centred on the same actions was previously thrown out by the judge, and she hoped that this time the same thing would happen. She also said that the accusation was not a reason to resign, although the code of ethics of Barcelona en Comú provides for resignation from public office when a party member is accused of offences such as those that Colau is facing. Her party has since interpreted its code to assert that "resignation only has to take place in cases where there is an alleged personal 'benefit"' and it considered that in the current investigation "there is no accusation of alleged personal 'benefit', so that the party has exonerated Colau from any obligation to leave the mayoral job.
Junts warns that it will be "vigilant"
After the judge's decision today, Together for Catalonia (Junts) stated that it will be “watching” the whole judicial process affecting the mayor of Barcelona, although, it underlined, "without ever crossing the red line that Ada Colau herself crossed when she shamefully and unscrupulously took advantage of the false accusations against [former mayor] Xavier Trias”. For her part, the leader of the Comuns in the Parliament of Catalonia, Jessica Albiach, considered that maintaining the case is “a new demonstration that there is a dirty war against not only Ada Colau but all those councils who defend the municipalization of water and public utilities”. "Eleven or twelve [similar] cases have already been thrown out," she said, adding that it is necessary to "stand up to them, in order to defend those who defend the interests of the public."