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If you were an Emerita Resources (TSXV: EMO) shareholder trying to make sense of Spain last week, you could be forgiven for thinking you’d slipped into a parallel universe.
On December 4, Seville’s Provincial Court acquitted all 16 defendants in the long-running Aznalcóllar tender case, ruling there was no evidence of influence peddling, fraud, malversación, environmental prevarication — nothing at all. The decision praised the “impartiality and professionalism” of officials, and went so far as to order Emerita, Ecologistas en Acción and Andalucía Mining to pay costs for pursuing what the judges called an “infounded” accusation.
Five days later, on December 10, one of the key officials just cleared in the Aznalcóllar case, Vicente Fernández Guerrero, a former top regional industry official who later ran Spain’s state holding company SEPI, was arrested again. This time, Spain’s national police unit for major corruption cases picked him up along with political operator Leire Díez and businessman Antxon Alonso. The three are now being investigated in a separate case over alleged bribes, influence-trading, and rigged public contracts linked to a network of companies close to senior figures in Spain’s ruling Socialist Party.
Less than a week separates the court telling Spaniards there was no corruption in the Aznalcóllar award and anti-corruption police putting one of its key protagonists back in a cell.
A Frustratrating Decision
For Emerita, which has spent a decade arguing the 2015 Aznalcóllar tender was improperly awarded, the criminal verdict landed hard. The Seville court in acquitting all 16 accused, dismissed corruption allegations, but indicated the ruling does not imply there were no irregularities in awarding of the public tender. The court also indicated that adjudicating public tenders is not the purview of the criminal court and should be dealt with in the administrative court system.
That interpretation is miles from how Emerita and its lawyers see the evidence.
In our recent interview with CEO David Gower he was blunt:
“Our counsel and I — and I think many people — are very surprised that nobody was actually convicted… the evidence would certainly at the very least warrant conviction on prevarication.” He added that Emerita’s lead Spanish counsel, with more than 40 years’ experience, “has never seen a resolution quite like this.”
Emerita’s frustration stems from a 3½-year police investigation and a prior ruling by five superior court judges who concluded corruption crimes had been committed. Instead of reinforcing that, the trial judges effectively pushed the dispute back to the administrative court — the court that will ultimately decide whether the tender itself was legal.
Five Days Later: Back in Custody
Five days later, the contrast could not have been sharper. While the criminal court portrayed the original tender as a model of administrative integrity, the new case unfolding in Madrid paints a far murkier picture.
According to Spanish press reports, Judge Joaquín Gadea of the National Court has opened a sweeping inquiry into alleged bribery, influence-peddling, and the manipulation of public contracts across several state agencies. Fernández, Díez, and Alonso are accused of participating in a scheme that allegedly steered government work toward politically connected firms and, in Díez’s case, attempted to interfere with anti-corruption investigators themselves.
The investigation is under seal and no charges have been proven, but the timing is extraordinary: one week, a court insists there was no corruption around the Aznalcóllar tender; the next, anti-corruption police are frog-marching one of its central figures back into custody. For Emerita investors, it is hard not to question whether the full story has really been told.
The Administrative Court Decision Looms
All eyes now turn to the administrative court, the body that actually decides who should control Aznalcóllar. Unlike the criminal trial, this process examines whether the 2015 tender complied with Spain’s public-procurement laws. And it has already been underway for years.
The judges have reviewed the documentation and previously signaled concerns about irregularities, though they delayed ruling until the criminal case concluded. With that hurdle now cleared, a decision is expected in the months ahead. For Emerita and Aznalcollar, this is the real battleground: if the tender is deemed invalid, Aznalcóllar could still be reassigned.
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