Supreme Court to review ex-Valencia premier’s acquittal in suits-for-contracts case

The Supreme Court will meet next month to decide whether to revoke a jury’s acquittal last year of former Valencia regional premier Francisco Camps on bribery charges. The accusations stemmed from the Popular Party (PP) politician allegedly accepting dress suits and other luxury items from a group of businessmen who received fat contracts from his government as part of the Gürtel scandal which has dogged the conservative grouping.

On Thursday, justices from the top court agreed to review an appeal presented by the Valencia Socialist Party (PSPV-PSOE), which asked them to throw out the January 2012 jury acquittals of Camps and Ricardo Costa, the PP secretary general in the region.

A five-justice panel will meet in a closed-door session on April 9 to decide on the appeal. Lawyers for the PSPV argue that there was “an obvious contradiction” between the evidence that jurors determined was unquestionable and their subsequent decision to acquit.

Virgilio Latorre, the lawyer representing the Socialists, asked the Supreme Court to convict and sentence Camps and Costa or, at least, order them to face nine new jurors at a retrial.

A tailor at the shop testified that businessmen had paid for the suits Camps had made to order

In a five-to-four vote, the two PP politicians were acquitted on January 25, 2012 on charges that they received more than 23,000 euros in tailored dress suits and other luxury items between them from Álvaro Pérez, one of the alleged leaders of the Gürtel corrupt businessmen’s network. Pérez, whom Camps once described as my “dear friend,” ran the PR firm Orange Market that received hundreds of thousands of euros in contracts from the Valencia government between 2005 and 2009 to organize various events.

Pérez is one of dozens of people still under investigation in the sprawling Gürtel inquiry.

Camps, who stepped down as regional premier in 2011, months after he was re-elected and just before he was put on trial, has maintained that he paid for the suits and other dress items at an exclusive Madrid men’s store, Forever Young.

But a tailor at the shop testified that Pérez and other individuals had paid for the suits that Camps had made to order.

Anticorruption prosecutors were asking that Camps pay a 33,000-euro fine. But the PSPV, which brought a people’s complaint against the former regional premier, wanted a harsher sentence in the event of a guilty verdict -- three years in jail, plus an eight-year ban from public office.