The judge of the National Court (AN) Joaquin Gadea has requested the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor to review your request to transform the investigation carried out in the Acuamed case warning that the reform of the crime of embezzlement could cause a reduction in sentences.
The step carried out by the aforementioned court is the first known of these characteristics. In an order dated December 29, the reinforcement magistrate of the Central Court of Instruction Number 6 requests the prosecutor in charge of the case, Immaculate Violanindicating whether, “in view of the reforms introduced by LO 14/2022 of December 22, it maintains the request for conversion to summary“.
Specifically, the Court in its brief details that the government reform has not only modified the content of the crime of embezzlement, but has also changed the “penological limits” planned to date.
In it Acuamed case, investigated in the National Court, alleged crimes of embezzlement are being investigated, as well as fraud, bribery, falsehood, prevarication, influence peddlingbelonging to a criminal organization and plotting to alter the price of public tenders.
The court led by Manuel Garcia Castellon focuses on the alleged fraudulent awarding by the acuamed company of works to a dozen companies and in the falsification of certifications and liquidations for significantly increase the amounts received by the winners of the public body contracts.
It was on November 29 when the anti-corruption prosecutor asked to transform it into a summary procedure, a procedure that is followed when investigating facts that could constitute crimes with penalties of more than nine years in prison, as well as the investigative statement of the defendants.
A single criterion with “speed” and “consensus”
The State Attorney General’s Office will establish a single criterion to be applied in the reviews of convictions for embezzlement, with “speed” but also seeking “consensus”, once the reform of the Penal Code that reduces the penalties for that crime when there is no profit motive.
The Prosecutor’s Office has been working for weeks to draft an instruction that sets the guidelines for applying the penal reform on the crime of embezzlement that will come into force next Thursday and that, according to sources from the public ministry, has many “nooks and crannies”“.
The guideline to be established by the General Prosecutor’s Office aims to set the criteria in cases of open cases for embezzlement and, especially, in the reviews of the sentences for this crime handed down in accordance with the 2015 reform, when the requirement of profit motive in the criminal type was suppressed.
