The Ombudsman had some of that entity's reception centers for minors arriving in pateras (small boats) in its sights due to deficiencies, and the Prosecutor's Office for Minors could not account for the 12 million it has received in the Canary Islands, but no one suspected that the public money it administered had allegedly been used to pay for beauty treatments, Viagra, and expenses in restaurants and stores.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has denounced four directors of the Siglo XXI Social Response Foundation in charge of the Guiniguada, Alcorán, and Portobello (Gran Canaria) and La Santa and Yaiza (Lanzarote) immigrant minor reception centers, after gathering evidence that they may have embezzled public money for their own benefit, diverted from its original purpose: to integrate children and adolescents in distress.
In a lawsuit filed on May 25, reported by "Canarias 7" and accessed by EFE, the Public Prosecutor's Office details, for the moment, expenses "without justification" for more than 41,000 euros, but also suggests that this amount may only represent a part, because "an effective monitoring of the material destination of the huge amount of public money transferred to the Foundation has not been carried out."
In fact, it asks the court of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria in charge of the case to order an "exhaustive" audit of how this entity has spent the 12,505,878 euros it has received since 2020 from the Department of Social Rights of the Canary Islands Government, since it sees evidence of embezzlement, falsehood, and unfair administration.
The incident has a context: the Canary Islands reception network had been dismantled after the "cayucos crisis" of 2006 due to the shift in migration routes towards the Mediterranean, so the rebound in arrivals from 2019 caught the islands off guard.
Almost 3,000 minors under regional guardianship
From receiving only a few hundred immigrants a year on its coasts for a decade (2010-18), the islands went on to care for 2,687 in 2019, 23,271 in 2020, 22,316 in 2021, and 15,466 in 2022. And the number of foreign minors under responsibility approached 3,000.
The impact on the Canary Islands Government, legally responsible for the comprehensive guardianship of minors in distress (a concept that includes those arriving in pateras), is well described by the lawsuit itself: in 2020, its budget allocated only 25,000 euros for this purpose. That year, 16.62 million were spent, and in 2021, 69.82 million.
To address this, existing centers were used and, above all, new shelters were created through emergency procedures. And for both modalities, non-profit entities such as the Siglo XXI Social Response Foundation, among others, were used.
Regarding it, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office lists, from the beginning, some formal irregularities (it was not registered in the Canary Islands Registry of Foundations or in the State Registry, nor is it up to date in rendering accounts); it continues by emphasizing that the bank with which its centers in the Canary Islands operated closed its accounts due to the suspicious nature of its operations, and ends by going into details of how some directors spent several thousand euros of public money.
An "opaque and uncontrolled" scenario
The Public Prosecutor's Office recounts an "alarming" lack of oversight over the cash expenses made by the four directors of centers in Gran Canaria and Lanzarote who are being sued, which "paints a highly irregular, opaque, and uncontrolled scenario.""The defendants," says the prosecutor, "diverted to their personal accounts (...) monetary amounts that they kept, increasing their personal income at the expense of public money that they should have allocated to the complete care, for the social and economic integration of the foreign minors of the center they directed."
Over nearly a hundred pages, the Anti-Corruption delegate in Las Palmas examines the bank movements of the defendants (mostly cash withdrawals or transfers to their accounts), to conclude that they appropriated amounts ranging from 863 euros, in the least of the cases, to more than 18,000 in the most.
1,500 euros of public funds on a beauty treatment
What did the defendants spend that money on, according to the prosecutor? The lawsuit points out, for example, that one of the questioned directors paid 1,500 euros with the credit card of her center for services from an aesthetic clinic: a "full face," a beauty and facial rejuvenation treatment based on injections of Botox, hyaluronic acid, and other techniques, as detailed in its advertising.
Others paid with money from the immigrant care centers arriving in pateras for medications that, in principle, are not prescribed for minors, such as drugs against erectile dysfunction, analgesics intended only for adults, or treatments to quit smoking; in addition to expenses in restaurants or purchases in Primark.
One of the defendants claimed that his center had spent 20,288 euros on fuel in the second half of 2021; or what is the same - clarifies the prosecutor - 99.22 euros per day, equivalent to traveling 1,200 kilometers per day in Gran Canaria, where going around the entire island represents less than 200 kilometers.
Anti-Corruption is clear about the consequences: in addition to "enriching themselves," the defendants "caused a decrease in the quality of comprehensive care for minors, in the facilities and in their stays, which is evident in the inspection reports" issued by the Prosecutor's Office for Minors, the Ombudsman, the Deputy of the Common of the Canary Islands, or the General Directorate of Attention to Childhood.
"The numbers don't add up"
These inspections led to the closure of one of the centers, the one in Portobello, in Puerto Rico, and in general they denounced overcrowding, lack of cleanliness, "lamentable" condition of the facilities, and "manifestly small, dark, poorly ventilated, bleak and prison-like" rooms, in addition to a lack of educators to help the children occupy their time.
"The numbers don't add up," said the report issued in March 2023 by the Prosecutor's Office for Minors after a visit to one of these centers, preceded by several inspections by the Ombudsman. "Either we do not understand how the funds received by the center for the maintenance of the minors are being invested," at a rate of 95 euros per day per child and 72 per unoccupied place available, he added.
Anti-Corruption now completes its diagnosis: "The payment of public money to the Siglo XXI Social Response Foundation during the years 2020 to 2022 must be the object of an exhaustive analysis, if we do not want to leave a space of impunity by not knowing how the management of the public money that has been given to it has been."
The Siglo XXI Social Response Foundation has published a statement on the cover of its website (www.frespuestasocial.org) in which it denies the irregularities and defends its work. For its part, the Canary Islands Government decided last Thursday to appear as a private prosecution in the case, as an injured party.