THE INVESTIGATION THAT WOULD NOT LOOK

Investigating Court No. 8 of Bilbao opened, on that complaint, Summary Proceedings 1447/2014. The investigation lasted more than two years, and on 24 August 2016 the court issued the transformation order sending the case towards trial.

What is decisive about that investigation is not what it did, but what it had before it and did not confront. In the proceedings were — or were immediately obtainable — the registry pages that established the calendar impossibility (the May 2012 application in the name of a company born in September); the SPRI's own requirement for lack of powers; the official audits and the appraisal of 1,778,000 euros; and the complaint whose first page attributed the management to the complainant.

The indictment that followed handled the corporate dates — 16-5-2012, 14-9-2012 — and yet maintained the accused's effective management "from 16/05/2012" without confronting the registration or the lack of powers (A.11; DOC-0134). It is not that the fact was missing: it is that it was there, was cited, and its consequence was not drawn.

An investigation is, by definition, the phase in which both what incriminates and what exculpates is investigated. When everything that exculpated was left unconfronted and everything that incriminated was taken as good, the trial that followed was already written before it began.