The congressional commission investigating the management of the dana which cost the lives of 230 people on October 29, 2024 will question this Monday the era advise of Justice and Interior of the Generalitat, Salomé Pradas, accused in the trial opened about the floods before the Court of Catarroja, and Cayetano García Ramírez, who served as regional secretary of the Presidency to the former president Carlos Mazon.
On December 1, after the broadcast on La Sexta of an interview with Pradas, the commission decided to summon her. Until that moment, the commissioners had chosen to delay the summons for which he was responsible for Emergencies, despite the fact that his name appeared just after that of Mazón on the list of appearances approved by that body.
A few days after the interview, Pradas handed over to Catarroja judge Nuria Ruiz Tobarra, who is investigating the case, the messages he exchanged with Mazón and with his former chief of staff, José Manuel Cuenca, on the day of the flood. From 11:32 a.m., Pradas punctually informs the president of the scale of the flood and the risk in the infrastructure that triggered the disaster, the Poyo ravine: “I am in communication with Pilar Bernabé (government delegate in Valencia). What is most worrying now is the Ribera Alta area, the Poyo ravine and the Magro river. We have just declared a hydrological alert in the municipalities of this area. ask for caution due to maritime storms,” he said via WhatsApp to Mazón, who at the time kept his institutional agenda intact.
In the messages provided by Pradas to the judge, we see how Mazón’s chief of staff and right-hand man, José Manuel Cuenca, gave instructions to Pradas throughout the day on how to manage the crisis. The former councilor reported to Cuenca, at 4:28 p.m., half an hour before the start of the meeting of the Integrated Operational Coordination Center (Cecopi), that she had been informed of a “death in Utiel”. A few hours later, at the height of the floods, Cuenca asked Pradas not to decree the confinement of the population: “Salo, if you confine anything, please calm down,” he wrote.
At 3:30 p.m., Cayetano García Ramírez, then regional secretary of the Presidency and current regional secretary of Economy in the Executive of Juanfran Pérez Llorca, must appear before the commission. According to what he said in his first statement before the judge, Cuenca asked Pradas to speak with García Ramírez to resolve his legal “doubts” about a possible confinement. The former regional secretary of the Presidency was the senior official who spoke the most with Pradas that afternoon, for five minutes and 33 seconds.
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