Víctor Gonzalo de Aldama Delgado is judicially only interested in telling the truth, not doing so would plunge him into misery. He did not sit in front of the court yesterday to give a report to anyone. He had already done that in interview after interview. The criminal Aldama, who is already a criminal since he has been recognized before the court as the author of the acts with which he is accused, sat in front of his seven judges with the sole intention of achieving the best outcome in penological terms, that is, in terms of the time that at a given moment he will spend in prison, or will not pass if he achieves his objective. This would also have been the best option for Ábalos and Koldo who, for whatever reason, have decided to risk defending the indefensible.
Aldama can greatly improve his criminal situation if he is truthful before the judges, if he is useful in his statement so that Justice is done, if he shows himself to be an effective cooperator by giving relevant information and nothing if he makes something “invented.” Lying would be judicial suicide for him, so why do it, just to insult the PSOE? I explain it. Anticorruption asks Aldama for a sentence of 4 years for joining a criminal organization and 3 for continued bribery, but the reality is that he still has a lot of room for improvement.
He has it because the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor has already requested the minimum sentences for each of the crimes, but has not applied any reduction in grade due to the analogous mitigating circumstance of confession. So it may still happen that in the final report, if the agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office to tell everything he knows is fulfilled, Luzón could still lower that sentencing request by one or two degrees. What’s more, his defense lawyer requests that his sentence be reduced by two degrees for this collaboration. If the court accepted it, the crime of integration into a criminal organization could remain in less than two years and the bribery continued in a few months of prison. Are you interested or not interested in being serious and fully collaborating? Let’s say that yesterday Aldama, whatever the collaboration pact he had with Anti-Corruption, was on trial, that Luzón would not have given him everything at once, that part of the benefit for pulling the rug and collaborating with Justice may be paid to him deferred in the conclusions, after having fulfilled his part yesterday in court.
So the confessed man, this one, began to explain what type of organization he participated in and what types of bribes he carried out. With great detail. Perhaps with some more detail than necessary, some embellishment, this is human, but this could not be too striking because it would destroy the credibility of the Prosecutor’s Office and render its strategy useless. We already knew most of the issues, because they were declared in the Instruction, because they were supported by the UCO report, because they are confirmed with recordings or with messages that work in the case. The invented one was not such. But he added other new ones. So, is what he says about Pedro Sánchez true? Do you have any proof of it? Is it, as the PSOE claims, mere slander to harm him and take revenge? According to Aldama’s interests, it should not be. It would be strange if it were to be harmed by mere spite towards the PSOE. And we must go beyond this procedure to understand why there may even be evidence of what he says and it has not been exposed in this trial.
Aldama appears in more judicial proceedings in the National Court and some are under secrecy. Regarding these, we cannot know what he has declared, nor what evidence he has provided, although we do know that he took to the AN the famous PDVS envelope that he has identified with illegal financing of the PSOE. Do you have evidence of many of the things you said yesterday in court? He may have them and may even have given them… in those secret causes. In some way, their collaboration with the Prosecutor’s Office is global and they could not tell us in this trial what has been contributed in those cases without breaking the secret. Don’t worry, because the court knows this just as we do and because it would be enough for Luzón to request a reduction in grade in his conclusions by making a passionate defense of the very effective, transcendent and total collaboration of the accused. The court will understand that if the chief prosecutor weighs in even more in favor of Aldama, it is because, in effect, he is singing La Traviata in all the open cases, providing evidence, and perhaps something else.
We also have the perfectly interpretable fact that Aldama has declared the first of all the accused, since in judicial terms this will allow the prosecutor and the rest of the parties to question Koldo and Aldama about everything we heard yesterday in the courtroom. These do, as they say, have carte blanche to lie; subject to the ability of the interrogators and the court to, through immediacy and their experience, determine if they are telling the truth in something. Both are headed for conviction, there is a lot of evidence in the process, and it is difficult for their attitude to lead to many changes in the tax treatment.
Lastly, but not least, yesterday we witnessed the verbalization in the solemn act of a trial of issues that exceed the purpose of this trial, of names that are not prosecuted, of illegal financing that is not prosecuted here. All protected by the explanation about the organization and bribery and by the established habit of Chamber II of not limiting the statements of the accused. Nothing would prevent Anti-Corruption from subsequently requesting, from the secret cases, the minutes of these sessions and even testimony of what is said in the sentence and thus turning it into new evidence in them. In this way, some issues that until now were only journalistic revelations would enter the judicial flow.
And the fact is that Aldama, to save himself as much as possible from that prison that he fears so much and that he has already spent a month and a half, has to achieve the lowest sentences in all the cases in which he is accused. When push comes to shove, the law says that he will only serve three times the maximum sentence imposed on him in the total number of trials to which he is subjected. The triple of one is three, but the triple of three is nine and the triple of four is twelve. With that in mind, Aldama declared yesterday and with that stuck in his soul he will continue to do so. That is why I am almost sure that he did not tell many lies and that there are even many things whose veracity or proof we will not know until the secrecy of causes such as the illegal financing of the PSOE, the rigging of contracts or hydrocarbons is lifted.
An invented one would bury him in jail, what’s the point?