The Prosecutor’s Office of the ‘Oikos case’ only sees “conjectures” in the suspicions of fixing of two First Division matches | Sports

The Oikos case, in which a corruption plot in Spanish football to place bets allegedly led by former players Raúl Bravo and Carlos Aranda has been investigated since June 2019, continues to thin out in the Court of First Instance and Instruction 5 Huesca where it is being investigated. . Prosecutor Victoria Arenere has presented a document in which she requests that the investigation that remained open into the alleged fixing of two First Division matches be archived, those played on May 18 of that year, the last day of the championship, by RCF Valladolid and Valencia CF (with a final result of 0-2) and Getafe CF and Villarreal CF (which concluded with a 2-2 draw).

The representative of the public ministry considers that, after almost five years, the investigations have only yielded “conjectures, hypotheses and convincing reasoning but which, it is insisted, do not prove the commission of the crime of sports corruption.” At this time, the court had already exonerated several players investigated for these matches from the case. The magistrate who initiated the investigations, Ángel de Pedro, already acknowledged in an order from November 2022, shortly before his transfer, about the extraordinary difficulty involved in pursuing corruption in sport, even when everything indicates that it existed.

The Prosecutor’s Office brief cites precisely this lament from the judge in the brief in which he now requests that the investigation into these two meetings be archived. “Taking the words of the instructor, we must take into account that, in the investigation and prosecution of this type of crimes, it is very difficult to have personal and direct evidence, unless there is a confession from a player or manager of a club involved. The usual thing is to have indirect or circumstantial evidence, which requires a complex intellectual process of reconstruction of a specific fact based on a collection of evidence,” he highlights. And he adds that “this reasonable and coherent inference is not sufficient or conclusive, since it is excessively open, allowing a range of alternative conclusions, neither absurd nor illogical.”

For all this, he concludes that “telephone conversations with incriminating content, the meeting between those involved, the good or bad actions of the players on the soccer field, unless it is obvious because it is extravagant or grotesque, depends on the subjectivity of the viewer.” , and it is very difficult to appreciate or objectify; and, finally, the fact of deleting chats of team players, will not be enough to sustain an accusation for a crime of sports corruption.”

However, he admits that in one of the matches for which he is now requesting the file, the one between Valladolid and Valencia, there were suspicious elements, although not enough. “The truth is that since there is no trace of money, it is difficult to prove this corruption, in which the possible participants have been very careful not to leave a trace of the possible agreements; pacts that, on the other hand, have not been recognized by the alleged corrupt players either,” he adds. Borja Fernández, former captain of Real Valladolid, was charged with this encounter, although in September 2020 he was exonerated despite the fact that the magistrate admitted that he maintained “a reasonable suspicion” of his participation in the events investigated.

Something similar happened in September 2022, when Judge Sara Uriel shelved the investigation into Jorge Molina, former Getafe player, and Miguel Ángel Tena, former soccer player and former Villarreal sports director. Both were under suspicion for their alleged relationship with the alleged match-fixing of the Getafe-Villarreal match, although they were never called to testify and nor were they formally charged. In the order, the judge also concluded that there was no “sufficient or conclusive incriminating evidence to justify the eventual opening of an oral trial against them.” After that decision, the investigation into the alleged match-fixing of this match was closed and now the prosecutor is considering finally shelving it.

Regarding this meeting, the Prosecutor’s Office now highlights that the conversations tapped on their mobile phones of some of the alleged members of the plot were brought under suspicion in which the need for Getafe to win the match was raised and that, to do so, seven Villarreal CF players had supposedly been offered two million euros to let themselves lose. “However, the result of a tie leads one to think that, regardless of whether the result of the match was manipulated, it was not what was sought and, most importantly, there was no modification in the betting markets that, in some way, , is what the spirit of the law tries to avoid,” emphasizes the public ministry to argue for also archiving the investigation of this party.

In a second letter, the Prosecutor’s Office also asks to archive the case against Francisco Javier Atienza, Pichu, who on June 4, 2017 played with his then team, Reus Deportiu, in a match with Real Valladolid in the Second Division that ended with a 2-0 victory for the former, corresponding to the penultimate matchday of that season. The investigations indicated that a third team, SD Huesca, paid a bonus to the Catalan club’s staff so that they would win the match and thus ensure the dispute of the playoff promotion to First Division that season. What is known as a third-party bonus for winning. In this case, the public ministry recalls that the Supreme Court ruling of January 2023 on the health case It decriminalizes, precisely, these payments and, therefore, reiterates “the request for dismissal with respect to this person under investigation, announcing that it will also request that the same procedure be followed with all those under investigation who are under investigation for conduct of the same nature.”