Malaya case: There are signs that the Magistrate José Godino is losing patience with the defence strategy

As the hearings for the Malaya case continue in Málaga, the defence lawyers representing the 95 accused of being linked to corruption in Marbella Town Hall, continue to demand that certain parts of the evidence be deemed void, alleging irregularities in the instruction of the case. 

Latest to demand evidence be deemed void was José Luis Rueda, the lawyer for ex Marbella councillor, Isabel García Marcos, who said that a search of her house was carried out irregularly, and that the 378,000 € cash, in 500 € notes, found inside by police cannot be considered as evidence. The defence claim both the search and phone taps used were illicit, and when removed from the case nothing will remain.
García Marcos faces a 12 year prison sentence for the misuse of public funds, administrative perversion, passive bribery, and altering the price of public tenders.

Juan Carlos Rivera, defending ex GIL councillor, Carmen Revilla, has asked for her initial judicial statement to be ignored claiming that it was ‘forced’.
‘At the time the only thing she wanted to do was to cook dinner for her three children and her 80 year old mother’, he claimed.

Rafael Mesa, the lawyer for another ex councillor, Miguel Jiménez, whose wife was the Mayor Jesús Gil’s secretary, and who suffered his heart attack on the day of his arrest, described the entire case as ‘grotesque’ and called for common sense to be used and for his client ‘not to spend a minute more on the accused bench’.

There are signs that the judge presiding the court, José Godino, is losing patience with this strategy from the defence lawyers, and has called many of them to order, stop gesticulating during the proceedings, and not to repeat their arguments. 

One lawyer, Pablo Luna, representing Marisol Yagüe, said that the Instruction Judge was not impartial because he had only received evidence from the Police and not the accused. ‘It’s like a father only listening to his son and not the teacher’, he said, thus implying that the police were part of the corruption. To that magistrate Godino threatened to get up and leave, saying sarcastically that it seemed the lawyer was better qualified to run to proceedings.

On Wednesday, Primitivo de la Quintana, defence lawyer for another ex Marbella councillor, José Luis Fernández Garrosa, spoke of the ‘disorder and chaos’ of the ‘fascist type’ instruction of the case , considering that ‘the most sacred Constitution, the mother of everything’ had been broken by the first instruction judge, Miguel Angel Torres.

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