An employee of the company Urbaser, in which Tecmed was integrated - beneficiary of the garbage contract of the Arrecife City Council in 2002 that gave rise to the so-called Operación Jable - has acknowledged this Monday before the Las Palmas Court that the delegate of Tecmed/Urbaser in Lanzarote, Jacinto Álvarez, asked him to monitor the former mayor María Isabel Déniz.
In the third session of the trial held against the former mayor of Arrecife, Jacinto Álvarez himself and nine other defendants, this employee has said that he found it "strange" that he was ordered to carry out this surveillance because "it was not part of his duties."
When questioned by the Anti-Corruption prosecutor, Javier Ródenas, he pointed out that he does not remember the details of those days in May 2002, the moment in which, according to the accusations, the contract was rigged in favor of Tecmed, but he did remember that he was ordered to follow and listen to the conversations of María Isabel Déniz and another of the defendants, the general secretary of the Consistory, Felipe Fernández Camero.
"I was surprised to have to watch the mayor, but I don't know why they asked me to, I don't remember," he clarified when questioned by the defense of Déniz herself.
Nor has he been able to clarify how the rigging occurred between Jacinto Álvarez and the members of the Consistory allegedly involved, since "more than ten years have passed since he first testified."
He did say that the former mayor "came to the Tecmed premises a lot of times" to talk to Álvarez, but he could not specify if it was during those days when the garbage collection contract was up in the air.
After, in April, several of the defendants who were part of it admitted to the prosecutor that they had participated in the rigging of the contest, the company Urbaser fired them.
He transcribed notes from his father
Jacinto Álvarez's daughter also testified this Monday, who admitted that she transcribed some notes from her father in the agendas in which he recorded all the activity he carried out, and which constitute one of the main sources of evidence for this case.
However, she has been summoned again to testify before the court of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas on Thursday in person, since she did so by videoconference and those notebooks could not be shown to her so that she could detail which annotations she had made and which her father had made.
The rest of the witnesses scheduled for this session did not testify, one of them because he was ill - the defense that had requested him renouncing him - and the other at the request of the prosecutor Ródenas so that he would have more time to analyze a new expert report presented last week by another of the defenses.
The trial will resume on Thursday with the rest of the proposed testimony, including the testimony of Jacinto Álvarez's daughter.
