The Criminal Chamber of the Court of First Instance of Ciudad Real has imposed a penalty of five years of special disqualification from employment or public office on the former mayor of Puertollano between 2003 and 2013, Joaquín Hermoso Murillo (PSOE), and on the then accidental municipal secretary, Juan Luis Vázquez Calvo, considering them responsible for a crime of administrative prevarication in the contracting of the works for the Cerrú football stadium.
According to the sentence, released this Wednesday by La Tribuna de Ciudad Real and to which Europa Press has had access, the judge assumes the thesis of the Prosecutor's Office, which maintains that the City Council signed a swap contract with a private company for the construction of the stadium in exchange for municipal plots, without processing the mandatory administrative file or calling for a public tender, thus ignoring the principles of publicity and competition established by the regulations.
The resolution, which is not yet final and can be appealed before the Provincial Court of Ciudad Real, confirms that the agreement was signed before being submitted to the municipal Plenary and that subsequent actions did not rectify this initial irregularity. Therefore, it is concluded that an arbitrary resolution was issued, knowing its illegality, eliminating any mechanism of competition and publicity, without public tender or prior reports, through a direct decision by the mayor to which a semblance of formal legality was later given.
The magistrate determines that Hermoso Murillo acted as the perpetrator of the crime of prevarication, while Vázquez Calvo acted as a necessary cooperator.
The so-called Cerrú Case refers to the administrative files and contracts related to the construction of the Cerrú football stadium and an operation linked to said project: the swap of land in the Abulagar neighborhood between the City Council and the company initially in charge of building the stadium, which was inaugurated in 2010.
In 2007, the then mayor Joaquín Hermoso Murillo and the accidental municipal secretary, Juan Luis Vázquez Calvo, agreed to formalize a swap contract with the company Promociones Inmobiliarias del Pisuerga (Proinsa), infringing the basic principles of publicity and competition included in the Law on Public Administration Contracts in force at that time.
On October 16, 2007, Hermoso Murillo signed the exchange contract. Under that document, in consideration for the construction of the soccer field, the former mayor committed the City Council to cede to Proinsa the municipal plots located in the Urban Development Plan of sector IV, known as "Abulagar", with a total area of 34,846 square meters. The building permit was granted to the company Teconsa, linked societarily to the Castilian-Leonese group Martínez Núñez and Proinsa.
The case originates from one of the most publicized episodes experienced in Puertollano. On the morning of July 11, 2018, agents of the Economic and Fiscal Crimes Unit (UDEF) of the National Police burst into the City Council headquarters as part of "Operation Cerrú", opened due to alleged irregularities in the contracting of the stadium works. From that moment on, twelve hours of searches and proceedings unfolded, marking a before and after in the judicial and police chronicle of the mining city.
That operation, with simultaneous searches and arrests —15 people were investigated—, was gradually reduced during the investigation phase, until six years later the existence of an organized criminal plot was ruled out, with only the alleged individual responsibility of the former mayor Joaquín Hermoso and the former accidental municipal secretary Juan Luis Vázquez Calvo remaining.
Furthermore, in November 2019, the Provincial Court of Ciudad Real had already sentenced the former mayor of Puertollano, Joaquín Hermoso Murillo, to seven years of special disqualification from employment or public office for a crime of administrative prevarication related to his involvement in the contracting and awarding procedure for the works of the town's bullring between 2007 and 2008. In that same resolution, the former municipal secretary Juan Luis Vázquez Calvo was also sentenced to seven years of disqualification for the same crime.