Spain’s Government has granted a partial pardon to Laura Borràs, the former president of the Catalan parliament and of the separatist party Junts, wiping out the prison term she received for corruption while running a public literary body.
The Council of Ministers approved the measure on July 28, at its last meeting before the summer recess. Her sentence of four years, six months and one day was replaced by one of two years, the Ministry of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes said.
The rest of the punishment, a fine and a ban from public office, stands. Spanish law allows courts to suspend terms of two years or less for first offenders, so Borràs is unlikely to spend any time behind bars.
She was one of five people pardoned that day. The Government also cancelled the outstanding prison term of Natalio Grueso, a cultural manager sentenced to eight years for embezzlement, forgery and corporate offences tied to his running of the Niemeyer Centre in Avilés, northern Spain, a project funded by the Socialist-run regional government of Asturias. The ministry cited humanitarian grounds relating to his health.
A third pardon went to Juan Fernández Gutiérrez, the Socialist former mayor of Linares in Jaén province, southern Spain, convicted of embezzling public money. His three-year term became two. Two private citizens convicted of public health offences also had terms of three and four and a half years cut to two.
The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) convicted Borràs in March 2023 of prevarication, the abuse of public office, and of forging official documents. It imposed four and a half years in prison, 13 years of disqualification and a €36,000 fine.
The court found she had broken contracts into smaller pieces so they could be handed directly to an acquaintance, an IT contractor, while she directed the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes (Institution of Catalan Letters) between 2013 and 2018. The Supreme Court upheld that ruling on February 12, 2025.
The pardon was granted on terms set by the sentencing court. Using article 4.3 of the criminal code, the TSJC told the Government in its judgment that the prison element was “disproportionate and excessive”, holding the ban and the fine were punishment enough.
The Government granted it over the objection of Catalonia’s chief prosecutor’s office, which argued that Borràs had shown no acceptance of her conduct and no intention to avoid reoffending.
Borràs said on X the Government had decided she would not go to prison while keeping her 13-year ban from elected office, and that the ordeal would not end until a court declared the case an injustice.
Jordi Turull, secretary general of Junts, said the decision “does not repair the harm already done”, accusing the judiciary of partisanship.
Carles Puigdemont, the party president who has lived outside Spain since the 2017 independence referendum, welcomed the outcome as a relief while insisting the prosecution had always been political. Sources close to him told El Español the gesture would not repair relations with Sánchez.
Junts announced a break with the Government in October 2025 and in June joined the People’s Party (PP), Vox and the Navarrese People’s Union in a motion urging him to resign. The vote had no practical effect.
The rupture stops there. Junts has declined to back the one instrument that would remove him: spokeswoman Míriam Nogueras ruled out a censure motion with the PP and Vox in May, and Turull had earlier said the party had not even considered one.
The PP puts itself four votes short of a majority for such a motion. Junts holds seven.
The amnesty was the price of Sánchez’s return to power. Junts made the law a condition of the seven votes that made him Prime Minister in November 2023, and it was drafted to erase the criminal consequences of the failed 2017 secession attempt.
Borràs tried to shelter under it. The Supreme Court and prosecutors refused, holding that carving up contracts for a friend was ordinary graft with nothing to do with independence. The pardon has now given her what the law could not.
On July 16 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled the amnesty did not conflict with EU law, since no European funds were involved. That judgment answered two narrow questions referred by Spanish courts, examining neither the law’s constitutionality nor the propriety of writing an amnesty into a governing pact.
Jorge Buxadé, who leads Vox’s delegation in Brussels, called the amnesty “the greatest attack on the rule of law and national unity”, promised to repeal it in government and accused the Constitutional Court, which upheld the law in June 2025, of being politicised.
The Supreme Court still refuses the amnesty to those convicted or charged with embezzlement, including Puigdemont, holding that the law excludes cases of personal gain. The Constitutional Court takes up Turull’s appeal on that point on September 22.
Sánchez has governed without a budget since 2023 and survives because no majority will vote him out. In June the Supreme Court sentenced former transport minister José Luis Ábalos, once his organisation secretary at the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), to more than 24 years in prison.
Five weeks later his Government cancelled the prison terms of three more people convicted of taking public money, two of them from Socialist ranks and one from the party that keeps him in office.
