The Diplomat
The Court of Auditors yesterday raised a preliminary question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the Amnesty Law, considering that the “possible extinction of responsibilities” for the alleged diversion of funds to the Catalan independence referendum could collide with the financial interests of the EU.
According to the ruling submitted by the Accounting Counsellor in charge of the procedure, Elena Hernáez, it is “very difficult to reconcile” the Organic Law on Amnesty (LOA) with the “prevention of impunity for fraud and corruption” pursued by European Union law and, in fact, if the directive of the European Parliament and the Council on the fight against corruption were already in force, it would not have been possible to approve this law in Spain.
The Court of Auditors believes that “the case could arise of the extinction of accounting responsibilities being declared in attention to purposes that are not really those foreseen in the amnesty law” and, therefore, that they would not benefit from the norm.
Specifically, the minister refers to the possibility that the alleged misappropriation of funds for the 1-0 and the external promotion of the independence process, for which the former president of the Generalitat, Carles Puigdemont, and 34 other people have been prosecuted, had not, in fact, been the events amnestied by law. “That is, that they were not, undoubtedly, actions aimed at promoting the independence or secession of Catalonia, or at procuring the holding of the consultations,” it adds.
Last week, the Supreme Court referred the law to the Constitutional Court because it considers that it violates constitutional precepts such as equality before the law or legal certainty, but to date no Spanish court had gone to the European Court of Justice.
The procedure is directed against 33 senior officials of the Catalan Government for their accounting responsibility in the diversion of public funds to finance the referendum of October 1, 2017 and the foreign promotion of the ‘procés’. The Prosecutor’s Office quantified this alleged diversion at 3.4 million euros. With its new action, the Court of Auditors suspends the Refund Procedure, as well as the immediate application of the amnesty formulated by some of the defendants on the same day that the law came into force, while the eight preliminary questions raised to the CJEU are resolved.
