In his decade as urban planning advisor to the Marbella city council, Juan Antonio Roca accumulated a fortune worth about 245 million euros (330 million dollars) including country estates and luxury villas, prosecutors will argue at a trial that began Monday in Malaga on the southern Costa del Sol.
Roca's fortune is alleged to have included art treasures in his bathroom, a tiger in the garden, a chapel with medieval sculptures and a helicopter pad.
Spain's biggest ever corruption trial features 95 defendants, including two former mayors, an ex-deputy mayor, former city officials, entrepreneurs, lawyers and art dealers.
The trial - which is expected to last about a year - is seen as a judicial watershed in Spain, where Marbella is regarded as being only the most flagrant example of wide-spread corrupt practices in the property sector.
Big-time corruption in Marbella - a jet-set tourist resort frequented by Hollywood stars and Arab royalty - is believed to have taken off under the late populist mayor Jesus Gil y Gil between 1991 and 2001.
It gradually increased to the point that it reportedly became practically impossible to get a building permit without paying a kickback.
The man to pull the strings for years is thought to have been Roca, the only one among the defendants to be currently in prison.
Roca appeared to be just a modest employee or collaborator of the city council, but in fact he ran Marbella, picking and dethroning mayors as he pleased, according to witnesses. 'I am the city council,' Roca reportedly said.
Corrupt officials working with Roca allegedly allowed entrepreneurs to build on protected land, to erect buildings which did not meet the required standards, to buy municipal land for throwaway prices and to obtain contracts without appropriate bidding proceedings - all of that, for a price.
'I do not move a single document, I do not move anything, I do not even start reading anything if I don't get money,' one of the defendants, former deputy mayor Isabel Garcia Marcos, said in a conversation taped by police.
Lower-level suspects who are being investigated separately include Isabel Pantoja, one of Spain's most popular singers, with a career spanning several decades.
She is suspected of laundering money on behalf of Julian Munoz, one of the main accused, with whom she started an affair while he was Marbella mayor.
Police uncovered the suspected corruption ring in what is known as the Operation Malaya in March and April 2006. That prompted the Spanish government to dissolve the Marbella city council and to temporarily replace it with a caretaker authority, in an unprecedented move.
The current city authorities are in the process of legalising more than 16,000 illegally built homes, as part of their attempts to improve Marbella's reputation.
Corruption is seen as having done important damage to Marbella's urban planning, and similar cases are not unusual in Spain.
They contributed to cramming the Mediterranean coast with an excess of apartment blocks and to overheating the country's construction sector, which earned more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) prior to th
The collapse of the construction sector worsened the effects of the crisis in Spain, plunging the country into its deepest recession in 60 years, from which it is now gradually recovering.
Spanish police detained nearly 1,000 people in different types of corruption cases, seizing goods worth more than 3 billion euros between 2004 and 2009, according to figures given by police.
Corruption generally, and especially on the local level, was an 'obvious problem' in Spain, the Council of Europe warned in a recent report.
The main defendants in the Marbella corruption case face prison sentences of up to 30 years if found guilty. All of the accused face possible jail terms amounting to a total of up to 500 years and fines totaling about 4 billion euros.
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