The Court of Instruction number 3 of Seville has decided to uphold the complaint of the Abengoa Association of Injured Persons and has accused the former president of Abengoa, Felipe Benjumea, and two other directors of the group for an alleged crime of falsifying the company’s accounts in the AVE project to Mecca, in which Sevillian engineering participated together with a dozen other Spanish companies.
The magistrate recalls in her order, of September 7, a judgment of the Supreme Court that states that “the crime of documentary falsification is not a crime of own hand that requires the corporal performance of the prohibited action and the fact that it is not proven The fact that a person had materially intervened in the forgery is not an obstacle to attributing authorship in such forgeries since to be an author it is not required that the person concerned has materially forged the corresponding documents with his own hand, it is enough that he has had the functional domain of the action and that another person, still unknown, was the material author, so that both the author who falsifies materially and who takes advantage of the action as long as it has functional control over the counterfeiting. ‘
The judge does not indicate the date of the testimony of Benjumea and the other two investigated – the financial director of Abengoa and the general director of Inabensa – and allows to wait for the completion of an expert report commissioned from Auren to “have a complete delimitation of the irregularities that are the subject of the complaint ”. Still, remember that those investigated can voluntarily request their statement.
According to the accusation, Benjumea had direct participation in the falsification of Abengoa’s accounts in this project to give the impression that the company was solvent. It was about transferring costs from one project to another to inflate the company’s profits and give the market an image of the group’s accounts that was not real. In other cases, even the company’s debts were not recorded in order to publicly present benefits that were not true.
In addition, the judge has accepted the statement of the director of Abengoa’s internal audit, for November 26, and has rejected other witness evidence requested by the Abengoa Association of the Injured.
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