José Luis Izquierdo, the well-known accountant of the Gürtel corruption plot surrounding the Popular Party, has presented a document before the court that has been trying him since this Monday, among a score of defendants, and acknowledges: “My work consisted of the accounting and management of cash funds, noting their origin and destination, always under the orders of Mr. Crespo and Mr. Correa. I also accounted and recorded the funds whose origin were illegal commissions, an end that is “It is included in the documentation that was found, in fact, in a blue folder and that also appears on the pen drive that was seized from me.”
The National Court judges the last piece of the Gürtel case on the concealment of funds from the Treasury and the laundering of money from corruption. Izquiedo, convicted like the main members of the plot in other previous trials, once again recognizes that “it was the assignment, under the instruction and supervision of both Correa and Pablo Crespo, to manage the opaque treasury or 'box b' of Mr. Correa, as well as its accounting.”
That 'box b' was intended, he continues, to “make payments to different public officials through opaque funds outside the legal economic cycle.” It was also responsible for lowering the base on which to pay taxes and “concealing the ownership of the funds of origin and destination.”
Along with Izquierdo, Correa and Crespo, the two 'architects' of money laundering, Luis de Miguel and Ramón Blanco Balín, sit on the bench. The latter, like the ringleaders of the network, has presented a confession letter.
Izquierdo tells how, to cover up the bribes that the PP politicians received, “he gave instructions to the suppliers in order to modify the concept of destination of the invoices, with the purpose not only of hiding payments but also of generating the appearance of deductible expenses derived from the economic activity of the events company.”
One of those suppliers was Milano Diversión, to whom it issued “intragroup invoices”, that is, in different concepts from the actual ones. Milano Diversión was one of the stores investigated in the Francisco Camps suit piece. The investigation indicated that the plot paid for the suits of the former Valencian president, but a jury ended up acquitting the politician.