MADRID, Oct. 25 (Xinhua) -- Spanish prosecutor Concepcion Sabadell on Wednesday assured during the trial of the long-running Gurtel corruption scandal that both former Spanish Health Minister, Ana Mato and the ruling Peoples' Party (PP) of Mariano Rajoy benefitted financially from money obtained fraudulently through the wide-ranging corruption ring.
Wednesday was the third consecutive day that Sabadell read the report she had drawn up over the trail with her conclusions following those from Tuesday when she said it had been "clearly and overwhelmingly accredited," that the PP had run a parallel accounting system in which to hide and money earned from bribes paid for the award of public contracts.
"There is solid proof that the PP has benefitted from criminal activity," concluded Sabadell, who pointed to former PP Treasurer, Luis Barcenas, as a key player, who had obtained illicit funds "for his work as an intermediary in adjudications."
Sabadell said on Wednesday that "it has been clearly accredited" that Mato benefitted by funds obtained by her former husband Jesus Sepulveda, the former PP Mayor of the town of Pozuelo de Alarcon, just outside of Madrid.
She explained that despite Mato having testified that family expenditure was shared and that she and her former husband had separate bank accounts, the documents shown during the trial contradicted those assertions.
Meanwhile the head of the Gurtel scandal, businessman Fernando Correa bought a Jaguar car for the couple and also paid for the renting of a Range Rover car, as well as paying family expenses such as trips and birthday and communion parties.
The Prosecutor added that the PP had also taken advantage of Sepulveda's "criminal activity" using the money to fund acts for the 2003 election campaign or the reform of their offices, when Sepulveda became mayor of Pozuelo and put the total benefits for the PP in Pozuelo to be 111,864,32 euros (around 132,097,00 U.S. dollars).
"Actions of extreme seriousness have been accredited" in local authorities governed by the PP, wrote Sabadell in her report, adding these acts "with their repeated violation of the principals of fairness, integrity, responsibility and equality in front of the law in the awarding of public contracts" were "an attack on the rule of law, that will have a high social cost to repair."
State attorney, Edmundo Bal, meanwhile calculated that around 15 million euros had been defrauded by all of the accused, describing them as a "cancer."
"These are people who were elected by the Spanish people to hold public positions, in which they were supposed to protect the general interest and not to commit fraud or robbery," said Bal. (1 euro=1.18 U.S. dollar)
