Mr Roca's rise to riches began in 1991

Once an unemployed builder, Mr Roca allegedly gave the former mayor Marisol Yague [euro]1.3m ([pound]800,000) in bribes, slipped to her in plain envelopes, funding a facelift and home improvements costing [euro]950,000. The deputy mayor, Isabel Marcos, had [euro]360,000 in cash at her home, while Mr Roca accumulated an art collection worth [euro]30m, including a valuable Miro, displayed in his steaming Jacuzzi. When prosecutors investigated 18 shell companies registered in tax havens worldwide to launder the ill- gotten profits, they found not one legitimate business transaction.

Mr Roca's rise to riches began in 1991, when he became the right- hand man of Marbella's flamboyant mayor, Jesus Gil. He subsequently amassed a [euro]120m fortune, according to the 450-page indictment issued recently by judge Miguel Angel Torres, made mainly from the greed and easy money of Spain's long property boom. Town halls throughout Spain were caught up in the tide of illegality, but the sheer baroque excess of the Marbella scandal dwarfed them all. Last year the government dissolved the entire council and installed a management committee.

paid money to Judge Francisco Javier de Urquía

The Andalucian High Court of Justice, TSJA, has said that ‘there is absolutely no doubt’ that Juan Antonio Roca, the ex municipal real estate assessor in Marbella Town Hall, paid money to Judge Francisco Javier de Urquía. The instruction judge in the Andalucian High Court, Miguel Pasqau, has thus ordered that the case proceed to a full hearing on the charges of perversion of the course of justice and bribery.
Charged are the judge, Francisco Javier de Urquía, who has now been removed from Court number two in Marbella, Juan Antonio Roca, and a man described as a friend of the two and named as Arnau Fabrice Albouhair.
Meanwhile, Ecologistas en Acción have denounced what they claim is the administrative perversion of the course of justice in Marbella Town Hall. They claim that the town hall’s decision not to revise the building licences of some 1,000 properties granted permission between July 1991 and March 2006 by the Jesús Gil administration amounts to that, as the permissions were granted illegally