Eleven months for four convicted
Alicante Provincial Court has sentenced former provincial PP deputy and Calp councillor Juan Roselló and his brother-in-law, Francisco Artacho, in the Aguas de Calpe case, according to the ruling published by newspaper Información and reported by La Marina Plaza. The judicial process has lasted two decades.
The sentence imposes on both of them, and on two directors of Aguas de Calp and Aguas de Valencia, Francisco Zorrilla and Alberto Mut, a sentence of eleven months in prison each for the crime of malfeasance concurrent with fraud against the Administration.
The court concludes that the awarding of works to the company linked to Artacho "was decided beforehand" and prevented other companies and self-employed workers from being able to bid for the work. It also considers it proven that the two convicted directors were fully aware both of the overcharging and of Artacho's company's lack of capacity to carry out the works.
A sentence far lower than requested
The convictions are far lower than what the prosecution sought. In 2021, the Anti-Corruption Prosecution Service asked for nine years in prison for Roselló and Artacho for continued fraud and malfeasance, and seven years and three months for Zorrilla and Mut. In the trial, held in late 2025, it reduced its request for Roselló and his brother-in-law to sentences totalling six years and three months.
The Court has applied to the convicted the highly mitigating factor of undue delays, given the nearly twenty years the proceedings have lasted. According to La Marina Plaza, the accused themselves were partly responsible for those delays.
The water network works
The case centres on renovation works to Calp's drinking water network in the mid-2000s. According to the prosecution, the Town Council, with Roselló as the chief official responsible for municipal water policy, assigned the work to the joint company Aguas de Calpe, which in turn subcontracted it to Obras Hidráulicas de Levante, a company controlled by Artacho. The Anti-Corruption Prosecution maintained that, through a scheme of overcharging and subcontracting, over one million euros went missing.
At trial, three of the accused pleaded guilty after admitting they had acted as nominees for Artacho, and reached a settlement with the prosecution.
The rubbish case pending
It is not the only case open against former Calp municipal officials. In March, the Supreme Court ordered Alicante Provincial Court to retry the ruling on the Calp rubbish scheme, a piece of the Brugal case, taking into account a telephone interception of the businessman involved that the Court had annulled as evidence.
In that ruling, from 2022, the Court had sentenced former mayor Javier Morató and former deputy mayors Fernando Penella and Juan Roselló to two and a half years in prison for bribery, malfeasance and fraud against the Administration, and Artacho to two years in prison. According to that sentence, the businessman paid 100 million pesetas (€601,012) in exchange for the waste treatment service concession in 1998.
