A FORMER Mallorca judge and prosecutor who broke the law during a probe into corruption within the Palma Policia Local have both been jailed for nine years.
The sentences- which will be appealed- was handed down on Wednesday by the Balearic Islands High Court(TSJB) to Palma’s ex-investigating judge Manuel Penalva and the former anti-corruption prosecutor Miguel Angel Subaran.
Prosecutors wanted both men to get sentences running at over a hundred years each.
The duo led the corruption inquiries into various police officers and the well-known nightclub owner Bartolome Cursach, dubbed as Mallorca’s ‘King of the Night’.
All of those probed were formally acquitted in November 2022 after Penalva and Angel Subaran were removed from the case.
Both men were convicted on counts of coercion and obstructing justice.
The court said they put pressure on a couple of Palma council officials and businessman Antoni Roig to exploit their prominent positions to provide evidence in their police corruption case- known as ‘Caso Oro’.
Four members of the Policia Nacional’s Money Laundering unit were also in the dock with two of them convicted and receiving jail terms of between one and three years.
The lengthy trial looked at the dubious ways that Judge Penalva and the Palma investigating court operated in bringing several high-profile cases to court between 2013 and 2018 including the Caso Oro and Cursach probes.
Prosecutors for example said that 15 people were arrested in the Oro investigation after testimony ‘of completely unspecific and speculative content’.
They added that after ‘a very deficient investigation’, the defendants made arrests, pressured detainees, suspects and witnesses, and sent them to prison.
The Prosecutor’s Office also referred to the arrest of the former PP politician, Alvaro Gijon, his brother and his parents with the motivation of ‘pressuring and softening him up’ and ‘inexplicably’ suggesting that he was behind several crimes.
Another element of the case was the fact that the media in Mallorca was illegally briefed by the defendants despite the various inquiries being deemed to be under ‘summary secrecy’.
