Supreme Court to request that Congress lift pro-independence MP's immunity

Junts per Catalunya spokesperson Laura Borràs is accused of favoring a friend in a public tender

JxCat spokesperson Laura Borràs in Congress, May 20, 2020 (Congress)
JxCat spokesperson Laura Borràs in Congress, May 20, 2020 (Congress) / ACN

ACN | Madrid

May 22, 2020 09:42 PM

Spain's Supreme Court have agreed this Friday to ask Congress to lift the parliamentary immunity of Junts per Catalunya (JxCat) MP Laura Borràs.

Borràs, the pro-independence party's spokesperson in the Spanish lower chamber, is accused of fraudulently selecting a supplier for services worth €260,000, as well as prevarication, administrative fraud, embezzlement of public funds, and falsifying documents.

The charges, which Borràs has denied, relate to a period between 2013 and 2018 while she was director of the Institute of Catalan Letters, a public body in charge of promoting Catalan literature and writers, particularly those writing in the Catalan language.

According to the investigators, there are signs that Borràs could have fraudulently allocated public contracts to a friend and avoided a public tender by splitting the service into various ones not surpassing the minimum threshold over which tenders are obligatory.

As an official elected to the Spanish Congress, Borràs can only be investigated by the Supreme Court.

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