The main ringleader of the Gürtel plot, Francisco Correa, has delivered the confession that was pending to complete his collaboration with justice, corresponding to the only piece that remains to be judged in the great corruption plot around the Popular Party. This is the money laundering case in which Correa faces a request from the Prosecutor's Office for 77 years in prison.
It has been five years since Judge José de la Mata ordered the opening of oral proceedings for this last piece of the macro case. Within its framework, the structure to defraud the Treasury and launder money from corruption is investigated. Correa will be accompanied on the bench by his top collaborator, Pablo Crespo, and the group's two fiscal 'architects', Luis de Miguel and Ramón Blanco Balín.
“Messrs. Crespo and Blanco Balín were the ones who took care of my corporate, economic and tax affairs in general, while I was usually outside of Spain. In fact, there are many names of companies established through Crespo, Blanco Balín and Agramunt, whose names I do not remember, but which are those that appear in the indictment,” Correa states in the document, to which elDiario.es has had access.
Francisco Correa recovers central aspects of the plot, such as the participation in the network of two prosecutors operating in Switzerland who integrated Correa's money into the same account in which Juan Carlos I had funds. These are Arturo Fasana and Dante Canónica, “who knew perfectly well the illicit origin” of his “capital abroad” and who were introduced to him by Ramón Blanco Balín. The fact of sharing accounts with the emeritus king in Switzerland was already the subject of Correa's previous confessions.
Blanco Balín, a businessman who was vice president of Repsol, was asked by Correa to regularize his tax situation in Spain. “Blanco Balín treated me contemptuously and told me that I was fully protected in the Soleado account, where, according to him, there were people of the highest importance in Spain,” Correa recounts in his writing.
And he adds: “(Blanco Balín) told me that if Judge Garzón ever summoned him to testify, he, as administrator of the companies, would state that everything belonged to foreign investors and prevented me from regularizing it, which I now greatly regret.”
Francisco Correa has been convicted in all the pieces tried in the Gürtel case but has been in the third degree of prison, free, since 2023 when he won an appeal in the National Court. The specialized court set the maximum prison sentence for Gürtel's leader at 18 years, which gave him the option of being released on parole. To remain in that situation, Correa had to continue collaborating with justice.