The former socialist provincial deputy Ricardo Cabezas, sentenced to nine years of disqualification in the “David Sánchez case” for the Badajoz Provincial Council’s hiring of the former Moncloa advisor Luis Carrero to assist Pedro Sánchez’s brother in his operatic projects, considers that his conviction is a “fable” and that it is supported by surreal evidence.
This is demonstrated by his defense in the appeal against the ruling of the Provincial Court of Badajoz, to which LA RAZÓN has had access, in which he concludes that “there is not sufficient evidence of the charge” to convict the former PSOE councilor for having directly intervened in the creation of the charge.
The court convicted Cabezas for his participation in the hiring of Carrero, who addressed David Sánchez as “little brother”, as head of the Coordination Section of Centers and Programs of Cross-border Activities. A position, according to the Court, empty of content that was only intended to satisfy the personal preferences of the musician.
“Your signature is not enough”
But his lawyer insists that he did not have any decision-making intervention in Carrero’s commissioning of services, despite the fact that together with Manuel Candalija, director of Culture of the Provincial Council, he signed the proposal to modify the list of jobs. “His signature on a proposal or having met Luis María Carrero” is not enough to condemn him, says lawyer Raúl Montaño.
“His signature is mandatory at the time of any proposal for a position,” he insists, “because he is the deputy delegate of the area, in this case that of Culture of the Provincial Council of Badajoz.”
Although he signed this job modification, his defense argues that the fact that this document was part of the procedure “does not automatically convert his political approval, linked to his status as deputy delegate, into the arbitrary resolution” that must be given in a prevaricating resolution. “Nor would the mere eventual administrative irregularity be enough, without more, to affirm criminal arbitrariness,” he adds before asking the Superior Court of Justice of Extremadura not to confuse “institutional action with objective criminal responsibility.”
Beyond this, nothing, he insists. “No final resolution of creation or award issued by Ricardo Cabezas has been identified, nor his participation in the assessment commission or in the award decision,” his defense emphasizes.
Question the UCO
In fact, he reproaches the court for having assumed the conclusions of the agents of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard. For example, regarding the email that David Sánchez sent him on June 30, 2022 in which – “as it should be”, he clarifies his defense – he informed him “of the progress or work” in relation to one of his operatic projects, “Operegrina”.
“We were not able to find a conductive link between this type of emails and some illicit acts that seem, with all due respect, to be in a fable,” the lawyer complains.
And regarding the text that Carrero sent to the musician from other of his operatic projects, “La paz perpetua”, suggesting that Cabezas sign it, he maintains that “it is nothing more” than “a triptych that is delivered “at the beginning of the performance” to which they wanted to give more “packaging” with the signature of some authority. “It is, sorry, surreal, that an attempt is made to highlight certain work relationships that are carried out every day on a daily basis to try to create a context that reveals a criminal network.”
“Direct” intervention according to the court
According to his defense, in fact, the only evidence against Cabezas is “the police report” from the UCO in which the agents note, strikingly, that the former socialist deputy “was never the subject of investigation.”
To impose a sentence for prevarication – transferred in his appeal to the Extremaduran TSJ -, he sees it as “essential to prove” that Cabezas “knew the patent injustice of the decision” to hire Carrero (who, according to the sentence, had already been collaborating with David Sánchez months before, when he was still working as an advisor in Moncloa) and that he acted “consciously to produce it or contribute to it.” But its institutional position on those dates, he adds, “does not amount to a presumption of knowledge of other people’s conversations or a supposed award decided in advance.”
According to the ruling, both Cabezas and Candalija “intervened directly in the creation of the position” awarded to Carrero and “in the proposal for “immediate and urgent” coverage of the same through secondment.”
Only in the event that the TSJ of Extremadura ratifies his conviction, does he ask the Chamber to specify that his disqualification sentence only extends to the position he held as a provincial deputy for Culture or similar, and not in an “indiscriminate” manner, as he considers the ruling does, “to non-analogous discretionary positions.” Ruling out, therefore, a “generic prohibition” of access to discretionary positions.