Mallorca's Moments Of Legal Tourism: Nóos Trial

Mallorca has had its several months of fame. Perhaps the tourism ministry should consider a new "tourist product" in its endless search for de-saturating the beaches of mono-cultural, sun-seeking northern European holidaymakers. They could call it legal tourism. Or Nóos tourism. A route (the ministry loves a route) for the greatest legal show on the earth of Mallorca. But who would really want to be shown around what - for purposes of the trial - was an adapted room in an office block on an uncharming industrial estate located ominously closely to the prison?

No, there's fame and then there's celebrity. It was Mallorca's fortune (or perhaps misfortune) to provide the location for Nóos and for global media hunger. They were attracted not by Urdangarin or Matas but by the princess. Has the ministry set a figure yet on how much the media spent in terms of accommodation, of daily spend per journalist/cameraman, of the knock-on benefit for bars and restaurants and shops? Has there been, will there be a promotional effort to attract visitors to the place where justice was enacted and seen to have been enacted in a confirmation of the soundness of the Spanish legal system? A royal on trial. And it was right here. Or right there on the otherwise non-descript Son Rossinyol estate. When (if) another royal is subjected to the whims of a peculiar organisation such as Manos Limpias, then they now have a far better option. Shift the trial from the Via Alemanya to the Palacio de Congresos - a palace fit for a royal trial.

Has the legal system been a winner or has it been a loser? Where the princess is concerned, it was both. It was a winner in that she was acquitted and others, such as her husband, were not. It lost because it allowed for a prosecution that should never have been brought and not only against the princess.

Juan Pedro Yllanes, who would have headed the judges' panel had he not opted to become a Congress deputy for Podemos, observed that the outcome - the verdicts and sentencing - could have been foreseen. He, therefore and without obviously having the full evidence to consult, was able to predict an acquittal. Mostly anyone else could have as well.

It was the damning conclusions of the judges directed at the Manos Limpias prosecution of the princess and of the wife of Diego Torres that held up the right to a private action under the legal system to ridicule. The judges were particularly condemnatory of the latter stages of the trial. Manos Limpias, by then under the scrutiny of the allegations raining down on it of extortion - pay up and prosecutions will be dropped - showed "minimum prudence" which made "abusive" its right to pursue its actions. Its case was "devoid of consistency". Manos Limpias wanted its several months of fame. It got it, but it was twisted into notoriety by its own warped sense of entitlement.

Perhaps, however, the legal system was not a loser in enabling the princess' prosecution to proceed. Where, after all, was the fabric for Manos Limpias woven? Not solely within its factory for the allegations that have since been levelled at it. Judge Castro was the weaver. Held up as a people's hero in his tireless targeting of the corrupt, his reputation has been diminished. The anti-corruption prosecutor Pedro Horrach, who disagreed with Castro from the outset, has referred to a regrettable loss of time - four years of instruction, which ultimately led nowhere. He has also regretted the fact that his own independence was questioned. That he, by not pursuing a state prosecution, was somehow got at.

There will be many who will believe that the princess got off scot-free. Surely, they will think, she must have been party to the design of the web of businesses through which public funds were diverted? Why surely? She said repeatedly in refusing to answer Manos Limpias' lawyer and responding only to her lawyer that she trusted her husband. The very model of the modern royal marriage. A one-time golden couple. She knew her place. And that was to let Iñaki take care of business. She never questioned it. Or the basis for the spending she was able to indulge in. She has been fined over quarter of a million euros for having been an unquestioning wife.

The legal system is a winner, though, in having snared Iñaki and Torres, the latter the recipient of the stiffer sentence. Iñaki, clearly not an unclever man, was nevertheless not as clever as Torres. Or as clever as Torres thought he was. Perhaps there should be some sympathy for Iñaki, who - as Horrach has noted - did not participate in the creation of the structure for money laundering. The sympathy evaporates because he knew full well what was going on. Unlike his wife.

The Land Of Lawyers

Are there more lawyers per head of population in Mallorca than anywhere else in the Western world. It can seem as though there are, and their number is only matched or surpassed by architects.

One of these lawyers is Manuel González Peeters. He is defending the former business partner of Princess Cristina's hubby at the interminable Nóos trial. A week or so ago, he described a witness at the trial - one-time justice minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón - as an idiot.

Whether he is or he isn't is irrelevant, but court protocol and all that demands a degree of civility. González Peeters was thus himself hauled before the protocol beakery and asked to explain himself. He did so by arguing that, in the Bible, Luke had used idiot to mean someone who doesn't listen and that many popes have used the same word for the same reason. So that was that cleared up then.

Meanwhile, someone who isn't a lawyer but a judge, no less than Judge Dredd - José Castro pursuer of ex-Balearic president Matas, Princess Cristina's hubby and indeed the princess herself - was letting it be known that while he was investigating what resulted in Cristina's appearance at the trial, her lawyer, Miguel Roca, had requested a "discreet" meeting.

"I didn't ask what the agenda would be, as it was obvious that Sr. Roca and I had no other issue in common than Doña Cristina de Borbón," explained the judge. The meeting never took place, but the implication of the proposed meeting raised, how might one put it, certain suspicions.

Sr. Roca, when it comes to the making of the film of the trial, will be played by Ian Richardson, he of "House Of Cards" fame. Or would be if he (Richardson) wasn't dead. The likeness is, nonetheless, striking. And as part of the script for the film will be Sr. Roca's denial of there having been such a proposed meeting.

Judge Dredd, it might be recalled, had a falling-out with the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, the lawyer Pedro Horrach, over Cristina. Horrach said there was no case. Dredd said there was and so opened the way to what has amounted to a private prosecution by Manos Limpias.

This so-called union has since come under investigation because of allegations that it was extorting money from those it intended to prosecute. Pay up and the cases would be dropped. One such example was the princess. Allegedly. Manos Limpias is saying it didn't seek such remuneration. Sr. Roca, among others, insists that it did. The National Police, meanwhile, have said that there was what appeared to be a "common strategy" in respect of these claims against Manos Limpias, as in "denuncias" from Sr. Roca and two banks - Caixa and Sabadell - were lodged on 29 and 30 March. Were they a coincidence?

Spain In A Day: Insults and tedium

Multi-tasking you could call it, were it not for the fact that the task was singular. Multi-single tasking, if that isn't an oxymoron, which it probably is. The task was writing. So, nothing unusual in that regard. But it was a day - Wednesday - that demanded simultaneous tasking, a day that was unusual in that it projected onto screens, Twitter and multimedia for the multi-tasking the coalescing of great institutions. Parliament, not one but two, the judiciary and the monarchy. All that was missing was the church, though it, buried within the bile that was being belched in Congress, was a bystander on this day of multi-institutional exposure. 

The tasks were these: keeping across debate in the Balearic parliament; keeping across the interrogation of the one-time Duke of Palma; keeping across the debate (the wrong word) on the investiture of Pedro Sánchez. Of these, the first was uncommonly civilised and meaningful in that a key subject was of broad interest. On too many occasions, the Balearic parliament peers deep into its rectum and plucks out arguments that are of no interest other than to parliament itself.

The subject was holiday rentals. For once, parliament was capable of arriving at unanimity - consensus in today's politically correct parlance. It agreed that regulation should be introduced within six months. The unstated message was why it had been taking the government so long to pull its finger out on a subject of infinitely greater importance than the wretched tourist tax. There are times, perhaps, when messages need not to be stated. Let's just all agree to agree and get on with it.

The normal state of dysfunctionality of the Balearic parliament - puerile debate, childish remarks, egotistical posturing - was momentarily cast into the background. It was the national parliament, the Congress of the Cortes, that was to borrow what is usually the normality of Palma's institution. Borrow and graft on insults and observations that should play no part in the most important of institutional processes - the confirmation or otherwise of His Majesty's principal political officer.

It has occurred on more than one occasion that current-day Spain is in a constant state of historical regurgitation. And here was an occasion which confirmed this. While minor parties had their digs, and these included aspirations of independence for Catalonia and the Basques, there was Pablo Iglesias of Podemos, a party that is highly contemporary and yet a relic of the past. How can it be anything other than when references can be made to the Civil War and to the dark fight with ETA terrorism in the early 1980s? Iglesias's dredging up of the murder of two ETA terrorists in 1983 was reprehensible, an utterly uncalled-for stick with which to beat Pedro Sánchez. The murders were themselves appalling, but Iglesias should remember the context. Spain was still in turmoil, with ETA at the centre of this. A year before there had been another coup attempt (covered up) which had sought to deprive Felipe Gónzalez and PSOE the government it deserved. All that Iglesias succeeded in doing was to trigger suspicions that Podemos is not wholly without ETA sympathies.

The debate, which wasn't a debate just an excuse for pathetic trading in insults, was always destined to be a charade. Sánchez had no hope of winning. I had written the introductory paragraph long before the vote was taken; all that was needed was slight tweaking. Mariano Rajoy, as malicious and small-minded as Iglesias in his abuse, suggested that the King hadn't been fooled, and thus managed to suggest that the King had been fooled. The monarch should have been left out of this disgraceful exercise in his name, but this couldn't have been avoided. The King had given Sánchez his blessing to attempt to form a government. Well, someone has to try.

Inadvertently, Wednesday became a bad day for the monarchy. In the court in Palma, the ex-Duke of Palma was subject to the questioning of Pedro Horrach. Of the three tasks this was by far the most tedious. Listening to Horrach deliver questions as though he is an aloof maths teacher, listening to Urdangarin's monotonous replies, the best that one could say that it was at least civilised, albeit that the presiding judge had to rebuke Horrach for constantly asking about invoices. Rebuke? What for? Aren't the invoices crucial to the whole case?

But it was the fact that the Royal Household was supposedly overseeing all that went on at Nóos made it a bad day for the monarchy: Congress and its antics just confirmed this.

It was a curious day of multi-single tasking. A day when the institutions of Congress and monarchy seemed to be unravelling and yet when the judiciary, with its prosecutor's forensic obsessions, and - most surprisingly of all - the Balearic parliament with its consensus came to the rescue. It was Spain in a day. Contrary and exhausting.

The Comfy Chairs Of The Noose Inquisition

You don't get weeks like last week too often. For starters the gun went off for the start of the Trial of the Millennium. Minute-by-minute updating was being offered via the media. Faces and body language of the accused were being analysed. Diego Torres's defence lawyer referred to sexual unorthodoxy when he had meant to say procedural unorthodoxy. Everyone fell about in fits of laughter, except perhaps Torres, Ignatius and the Infanta.

For the gathered tribes of the media, it soon became apparent that they are going to have to endure weeks of total tedium. Unless the court decides that the Infanta can shoot off back to Geneva, having escaped with a Botin defence and a repayment to the Hacienda of a few hundred thousand euros, it'll be weeks before anything of any note occurs, such as one of the accused being put on oath, and months before we come to the main event, with the Infanta in the dock and faced with the wrath of the clean hands of Manos Limpias and its desire for Infantacide. Accordingly, therefore, the TotM started and then everyone promptly forgot about it.

Of the body language experts pressed into service, as they typically are on such occasions, there was the distance between the Infanta and Ignatius as they attempted to steal into the courthouse under the cover of almost total morning darkness, save for the dozens of journalists camped outside along with the dozens fewer Republicans who did what Republicans do, which is to protest. What did this distance signify? Nothing probably, given that it would have been odd had they marched in hand in hand and smiling in a beaming fashion to rival even Palma's mayoral Smiler High-la.

Where one felt somewhat sorry for them was with the seating. Can't the court system stretch to something more comfortable on which to sit for hour after hour? Or perhaps it's a means of extracting confessions. "Yes, I admit it. I nicked six million euros. But for God's sake, can I now have a comfy chair to sit on?" "Cardinal Fang, fetch the comfy chair. Nobody expects the Noose Inquisition by visitor's seat without adequate padding."

In addition to the body language sorts, various protagonists in the Noose affair were being talked to by the media who hadn't been caged into the courthouse. There was, for example, the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach. An interview with one particular newspaper ("El Mundo") was most notable because of the accompanying photo. Next to him in his office were massive boxes secured with Guardia Civil tape, and these boxes were piled up inside a Mercadona shopping trolley. This, the trolley, led readers to offer comments questioning, quite legitimately, what a Mercadona shopping trolley with boxes of Guardia evidence was doing in the immediate proximity of the chief prosecutor. One of them suggested that it might have been subliminal advertising. Or some form of product placement.

As yet, there has been no explanation as to the appearance of the trolley. Nor, or so it would seem, have Eroski, Carrefour or Lidl (other supermarket chains are available) approached other prominent members of the establishment and asked if they would like a trolley for their next media photos.