The Supreme Court has scheduled a new date to review the ruling issued by the provincial court in the case centered on alleged irregularities in Alicante’s PGOU planning process. In this matter, former Alicante mayor from the PP Luis Díaz Alperi and businessman Enrique Ortiz were convicted of bribery, while the other seven defendants, including former PP councilor Sonia Castedo, were acquitted of the corruption charges they faced. The appeals were filed by both the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the two convicted individuals.
In the second instance, the court will deliberate again, with the hearing set for April 24, following the annulment of the first session which had been scheduled for February 20. The initial session was halted after Judge Vicente Magro of Alicante recused himself on grounds of objective impartiality, prompting a reassignment to a different tribunal.
The Supreme Court issued a formal order to the parties, confirming the new date as well as the composition of the bench. The panel will be presided over by Manuel Marchena, who also serves as the president of the Second Chamber, and will include magistrates Juan Ramón Berdugo, Ángel Luis Hurtado, Javier Hernández, and Andrés Palomo, who will act as rapporteur. None of these justices sat on the first chamber, where Magro was designated as rapporteur. The former head of the Alicante Court of Appeal, serving from 2001 to 2016, sought removal due to prior participation in this very case, with two signed resolutions offered in support of his claim, which disqualifies him from participating in the cassation proceeding.
Some observers note that this development has added only a two-month delay to the fresh deliberation on these appeals, a significantly shorter postponement than that seen with the first Brugal case process, which has involved supposed irregularities in the award process for waste collection in Orihuela and has also become entangled with the PGOU matter.
The original verdict on the alleged manipulations of Alicante’s PGOU was issued over two years ago by the judges Cristina Costa, Margarita Esquiva, and Montserrat Navarro, with Navarro serving as the reporting magistrate and now retired. Only two of the nine defendants were found guilty on bribery charges: Alperi received a 6,000-euro fine for traveling to Crete in a private jet for a personal matter, and Ortiz was fined 18,000 euros for giving Castedo, then mayor, a Carolina Herrera jacket.
The remaining defendants were acquitted. Besides Castedo, the case involved her brother, a business partner, another brother and an employee of the Alicante promoter, and two other businessmen, one from Elche, who were cleared of any wrongdoing.
What the Public Prosecutor’s Office requests now is a full retrial for all defendants. The prosecution argues that the cassation challenge seeks to annul the ruling and have the case judged again by a different tribunal. Among the grounds cited is that the public accusation outlined up to 57 irregularities in the processing of the PGOU, some of which are not mentioned in the current sentence.
It is also contended that the sentence does not reflect the signed agreement by Ortiz, his brother, and an employee, in which facts were admitted in exchange for a reduced penalty that would have guaranteed no prison time. That agreement, which the parties later recanted before the trial began, was not referenced in the Alicante Audiencia resolution. The underlying matter involves a public accusation presented by the Ayuntamiento as a private party and EU as a popular party, which would have been affected by the agreement, but which remains unmentioned in the current ruling.
The path forward will now hinge on the upcoming deliberations, with the newly constituted panel reexamining the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the PGOU process, as well as the alleged informal settlements that were criticized in earlier proceedings. The case, long embedded in local political controversy, continues to raise questions about governance, transparency, and accountability in Alicante’s urban planning initiatives.