Lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero will be in the dock next Tuesday, in what will be his first trial for corruption crimes. The former secretary of the Arrecife City Council and lawyer and advisor to the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, has pending cases related to both councils, and the first to be judged will be the one related to the southern City Council, in a separate piece of the Yate case.
The Prosecutor's Office is asking for 6 years in prison for corruption and embezzlement of public funds, for having charged almost one million euros from Yaiza, for allegedly unprovided services. The instruction of the case was closed seven years ago and the indictment was presented in mid-2015, but the trial has been delayed, as is the case with the piece of the Unión case in which he is accused together with María Isabel Déniz, and which is the only one that remains to be judged.
The hearing of this piece of the Yate case will be held for six days before the First Section of the Provincial Court. Initially, it was planned to be nine, but the defense lawyers argued that they had other appointments some days and requested its suspension. However, the decision of the Court was to eliminate those dates and reduce the days of trial, but with morning and afternoon sessions some days.
Thus, next week there will be four sessions (on June 14 and 15 in Arrecife and on June 16 and 17 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), and the trial would conclude the following week, between June 20 and 23.
Along with Camero, the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, the former secretary, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, and another official of the City Council, Antonio Fernández Martín, who acted as secretary-intervenor during part of the period in which the events occurred, will be in the dock. For the first three, the Prosecutor's Office is asking for 6 years in prison and 10 years of disqualification, while for Fernández Martín it is demanding 5 and a half years in prison and 9 years of disqualification.
"Arbitrary plunder of public funds"
The indictment maintains that Fernández Camero carried out an "arbitrary plunder of public funds" from the Yaiza City Council, since it considers that he charged nearly one million euros outside the law, without any legal contracting or services provided to justify those payments.
The Public Prosecutor's Office asks that the four defendants be sentenced to pay significant sums as civil liability, to return "jointly and severally" the money to the City Council, in the amount that each one allegedly contributed to embezzle. In the case of Reyes, it asks that he be liable for 842,721.28 euros, in the case of Bartolomé Fuentes for 726,260.56 euros and in the case of Fernández Martín for 115,742.63 euros. For his part, Fernández Camero is claiming compensation of 970,752.28 euros. Of that amount, "the company Adelfas 24 SL will be subsidiarily liable in the amount of 311,727.63 euros", since part of the money was invoiced through that company.
He accuses all four of a continuing crime of embezzlement of public funds and another of prevarication (in the case of Fernández Camero, as instigator). In addition, Fernández Martín must answer for a crime of falsification of an official document and Felipe Fernández Camero for another continuing crime of falsification of a commercial document.
The turn of the investigation
This piece arose from the Yate case, in which Reyes himself ended up confessing to receiving bribes in exchange for the granting of dozens of illegal licenses in Playa Blanca. During the investigation, lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero was charged, as he was considered the mastermind of the alleged criminal plot.
Afterwards, the prosecutor asked to file that charge against him, as he did not find documentary evidence of his advice to the Yaiza City Council, but at the same time he requested to open a new piece against Camero for embezzlement. And he understood that if there were no documents to justify that advice, there was also no justification for the monthly payments he received for years from the City Council, while at the same time he also represented as a lawyer beneficiaries of illegal licenses, such as Juan Francisco Rosa.
In addition to this trial, Felipe Fernández Camero also has another pending within the Unión case, in the main piece derived from Operation Jable. In that case, which has also been under investigation for years and pending trial, the Prosecutor's Office is asking for 11 and a half years in prison for crimes of embezzlement and bribery, among others. In this case, his time as secretary of the Arrecife City Council, under the Mayoralty of María Isabel Déniz, is being investigated. The Prosecutor's Office considers that Camero contributed to 'rigging' the award of the garbage collection service to Urbaser (then under the name of Tecmed) and that in exchange he received bribes from the company, including a trip to Kenya, to which he went with the former mayor and the couples of both.
Currently, that piece of Jable is waiting for a new court to be appointed, after another recusal of two of the magistrates initially appointed has been accepted, given that they had previously intervened in the case, having resolved some of the appeals of the accused.
