The last trial of the Montecarlo case already has a sentence, condemning only two of the eleven defendants who sat on the bench. One of them is the former auditor, Carlos Sáenz, and the other is the former Finance Councilor for the PNL, Isabel Martinón, whom he considers to be the perpetrators of administrative prevarication crimes.
Regarding the rest of the defendants, among whom was the former socialist mayor José Montelongo, for his time at the head of the Treasury, they have been acquitted in this ruling, issued by the Sixth Section of the Provincial Court.
As for Sáenz and Martinón, the ruling considers administrative prevarication proven, but not the rest of the crimes for which the Public Prosecutor's Office had filed charges. It so happens that Carlos Sáenz confessed again at the beginning of this trial, stating that the facts reported by the Prosecutor's Office were "true", but in the end he will not be held responsible for embezzlement of public funds, fraud against the administration or documentary falsification.
For Saénz, who already has other convictions behind him, the penalty established this time by the Court is only four years and three months of disqualification, applying as a "very qualified mitigating factor the collaboration with justice" and the "undue delays" in the processing of the case. For her part, Martinón has been sentenced to 7 years of disqualification. Currently, neither of them holds public office.
Along with Montelongo, former councilors Víctor Sanginés, Eduardo Lasso and Alberto Morales, businessman Carlos Lemes and municipal workers José Nieves Caraballo, Miguel Ángel Leal, Penélope Tabares and Isidro Hernández have been acquitted.
In the indictment, the Prosecutor's Office maintained that Lemes' companies, Inelcon and Señalcon, received more than 3.6 million euros from the City Council in just over four years, including payments for services not provided and inflated invoices. "A minimum of 757,675.34 euros (Inelcon) and 84,119.55 euros (Señalcon) correspond to services not provided," the Public Prosecutor's Office specified, which demanded prison sentences and the return of the allegedly embezzled money.
However, the Court does not consider this embezzlement of public funds proven and only sees prevarication in the way in which some of the payments were authorized. Specifically, in the case of Martinón, she had several written reports from a municipal technician warning her of irregularities in the file, but even so she continued with the payments. Among other things, the technician warned that there was no credit proposal and that other budgets had not been requested, but also that contracts were being split (in order not to exceed the limit that requires them to be put out to tender) and that "a company not qualified for this had been proposed."
