Lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero, who was removed from the Yate case after it could not be proven that he provided urban planning “advice” to the then mayor, José Francisco Reyes, defended this Friday that he provided “constant attention” as an advisor to the Yaiza City Council, and in particular as a “specialist in urban planning law.”
This is how he tried to defend himself from the crime of embezzlement for which he ended up being accused, and for which he is now being tried. “The attention I had to give them was constant. The Technical Office was made up of a head and then two or three quantity surveyors, and they had many problems, mainly urban planning, and they did not handle them easily,” he declared during the trial, thus defending the payments he received from the Council, which amounted to almost one million euros.
The head of the Technical Office ended up being convicted of urban planning prevarication, as did Reyes himself and the secretary-auditor, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes. These last two - now accused together with Camero in this separate piece of the Yate case - confessed in the main trial that they granted dozens of licenses knowing their illegality (and in exchange for bribes in the case of Reyes).
Regarding his “hiring” by the City Council, Camero referred to a plenary agreement from 1980, as the defenses have been doing throughout the trial, although the events being judged began in 1996, when Reyes' mayorship began.
“That agreement is part of this procedure. If that agreement does not exist, I have no appointment,” “they leave me in total defenselessness, because I have nothing to protect my presence in the Yaiza City Council,” he added, acknowledging that there is no subsequent document that justifies either the monthly money he received from the Council as alleged advice, nor the awards of the lawsuits he billed to the Council.
"I don't know the amount, but yes, I earned money"
The agreement from more than 40 years ago on which he relies to “justify” all those charges - and which, according to experts, has no legal validity - established that he would receive 300 euros (50,000 pesetas at the time) per month for advisory work. However, under Reyes' mayorship, he came to charge more than 2,000 euros fixed per month, to which was added another 700,000 euros for representation in alleged lawsuits, many of them undocumented, according to the instruction of the case.
“I don't know the amount, I don't keep the accounts. But yes, I earned money. I was a lawyer and other clients also paid me,” Camero responded to questions from the prosecutor, when he asked him about the money he billed, while he was also secretary of the Arrecife City Council. “I have never started doing the accounts. What I can attest to is that everything I was paid was the result of my services. Intense,” he added.
Regarding the fact that the price established in that plenary agreement to which he clings skyrocketed - which throughout Reyes' term would have amounted to about 40,000 euros, when he charged almost one million - he attributed it to “the CPI”. “As you well understand, the salaries are rising,” he replied to the prosecutor, without clarifying how these increases were approved.
“They were done by the City Council,” he ended up responding, although there is no document in which it is recorded how the prices were approved. In fact, there are not even prior budgets for the invoices that were paid to him for representation in lawsuits, nor decrees of award, nor proposals for expenses.
“There has to be. If not, you can't pay. Nobody makes a payment in a city council because it is simply said: I am going to pay”; “as you will understand, I cannot set my own salary and then have someone else pay it. That is not viable,” he maintained. However, that is exactly what the two official experts who have testified in the trial consider happened - one an official from the State General Intervention and the other from the Canary Islands Court of the Canary Islands - who were resounding in stating that “the established legal procedure was totally and absolutely ignored.”
“If it is not recorded (the prior approval of the expense) it will be because they have not been sent or have been lost. I don't know that,” he added when asked about other irregularities. And in all cases, he insisted that he, precisely on this issue, did not advise the secretary-auditor or the mayor.
“If the document was missing a comma or something, I regret having to repeat it to you, I don't know, because I didn't intervene”; “in accounting matters, my intervention was, if not null, quite reduced”; “it was the only thing, the only matter, with which I had a very close relationship. Those who were there knew what they had to do,” he replied.
"My services and those of the doorman at the entrance were not accounted for"
“Was the provision of these advisory services documented in any way by the City Council?”, the prosecutor asked him. “Mine were not accounted for, nor were those of the secretary, the doorman at the entrance or the administrative assistant,” Camero responded, comparing an external advisor who charges for certain services with a municipal worker.
“When a councilor asks me for information, when the head of the Technical Office asks me for information, they are verbal things, they cannot be documented,” he defended. However, he assured that he also issued written “reports” and, above all, “many notes”, although no trace of them was found during the investigation.
“The reports I issued must be in the Yaiza City Council. I don't know if something has happened with the documentation that has been sent, but of course that is not my fault,” he alleged.
“It surprises me very much,” he said at one point in his statement, when the prosecutor was pointing out new irregularities in the payment files. “But come on, I don't think so. I know the two people you have mentioned, I know what they are like, and they are not cheaters at all,” he stated in reference to the co-defendants.
“I know them and I know they did it, because they were neat,” “I would be very surprised if the mayor did something without the endorsement of the official who had to give it to him,” he added at other times, when talking about two people who are sitting with him in the dock, and who accumulate more than 10 convictions between them, which led them to prison and have disqualified them for decades.
Payments before approval of the expense
Among the documents mentioned by the prosecutor, there are “receipts” signed by Camero when collecting an invoice, with a date prior to the approval of the expense by the mayor. “I am not aware of it. But I have never had any awareness of substantive irregularities. Of something that we can really say this is strange. Nor do I think any of them did it. It's just that I know them,” he reiterated, again defending the honesty of Reyes and Bartolomé Fuentes, who only in the Yate case, confessed to crimes of urban planning prevarication, embezzlement and document forgery.
“There was a poor state of the archive. A bit of a disaster in the archive. I don't know if it will be for that reason,” he pointed out while they continued to ask him about non-compliance with legal procedures.
Regarding the lack of a stamp on many of the invoices, which were not registered, he also said that he was unaware of it. In this regard, his explanation was that it was on Saturdays when he went to work at the Yaiza City Council –“because on Saturdays they did not work in Arrecife”– and “if he had any minutes to deliver, he delivered them.”
In addition, he even defended that he charged allowances and taxis to the Yaiza Council, as the prosecution maintains. In this regard, he has only acknowledged that “he is aware” of one case, and has justified it because he had to go to “a negotiation” in Madrid, within a judicial procedure that he was carrying out. “It seemed to me that it shouldn't be something that I paid for.”
An "instrumental company" to charge the invoices
In recent years, Felipe Fernández Camero stopped issuing invoices in his name and began to charge them through the company Adelfas 24, which had no contract with the City Council and did not even appear in that plenary agreement of 1980.
“The work, all the work, was done by Felipe Fernández Camero. With Adelfas and without Adelfas. I did everything, before and after. Adelfas has not provided any service to the Yaiza City Council,” Camero responded to justify it.
According to his statement, Adelfas 24 is “an instrumental company” that he shared 50% with his wife, and that “all it does is invoice.” “It doesn't sell anything or take care of any function,” he added. In this regard, the prosecutor asked him about the corporate purpose of the company, in which, among others, “real estate activities” and “construction” appear.
“I don't remember. It was established many years ago. And I hardly take care of it... and without hardly: I don't take care of it,” he replied.
A firm sanction that according to him "did not exist"
During his statement, the prosecutor also asked him about the sanction imposed on him by Public Function, for a serious and a very serious offense as secretary of the Arrecife City Council, for holding positions incompatible with that position. And even in this case, the lawyer denied it.
“That sanction was totally and absolutely illegal,” he began by pointing out, despite the fact that all his appeals were rejected in his day and it is a firm sanction.
Later, he went on to say that the sanction “does not exist”, because “it was never executed.” It should be remembered that before the sanction was applied, which implied removing him from his position, what Camero did was take a leave of absence, and he has never returned to being an official of a public administration.
