The Supreme Court has ratified the statute of limitations for bribery offenses in the Fitonovo case and, with it, the acquittal of public officials and employees of the Government of the Canary Islands, the councils of Lanzarote and Gran Canaria and the Canary Islands Government who were prosecuted in that case.
The ruling now issued refers to the separate piece on the awards carried out in the municipalities of Seville and Algeciras (Cádiz), with penalties of between three years and two months for officials and businessmen, resulting from the appeal filed by a Fitonovo company and one of the defendants, which has been dismissed.
The ruling reviews what happened in the Canary Islands, where the crimes were declared prescribed and public officials from the councils of Gran Canaria, Lanzarote and the Government of the Canary Islands, officials and members of Fitonovo in the islands were acquitted.
The National Court at the time processed 45 people in this case, of which five were related to the Canary Islands, such as the entity's attorney on the islands, Adolfo José de la Torre García.
Later, in a separate piece on autonomous and island administrations, another four defendants were investigated: the former councilor of the Cabildo of Lanzarote Sergio Machín (Canarian Coalition), the on-leave official of the Cabildo of Gran Canaria Ulises Pérez, and the commercials on the islands Rubens Coba and Gustavo Adolfo Gómez.
They were joined by the head of Roads of the regional Executive between 2003 and 2011, José María Maya Cáceres, now deceased.
Among the proven but prescribed facts was the delivery to the former Councilor for Public Works of the Cabildo of Lanzarote Sergio Machín of 24,000 euros by the Fitonovo delegate in the Canary Islands.
Two other sales representatives from the companies Elsamex and Api Movilidad were accused of paying together with Fitonovo for a bachelor party trip to Marbella for Ulises Pérez, a trusted position of the former Councilor for Public Works of the Gran Canaria Cabildo, Miguel Jorge Blanco, when José Manuel Soria was president.
The instruction named the former head of Roads of the Government of the Canary Islands for having received 53,000 euros in cash and the payment of his daughter's move was accredited as consideration for his action in the award and execution of public contracts in favor of the company in that period.
Since 2022, the National Court has issued several judicial rulings on the different pieces of which in some an agreement was reached with the Prosecutor's Office and the mitigating factors of undue delays and confession were contemplated.
De la Torre García, according to the judge, was the head of Fitonovo in the Canary Islands and in charge of "all the corrupt contracts" with which the company made itself on the islands.
The judgments consider it proven that Fitonovo created an operational and accounting infrastructure aimed at obtaining irregular public contracts, enabling the company's commercial structure to form a network of contacts with officials.
These facilitated said contracting and "a parallel accounting was created that was nourished by false invoicing to, among other purposes, finance the payment of bribes to public officials."
The crimes that were raised were those of criminal organization, prevarication, bribery, fraud against public administrations, falsification of commercial documents, embezzlement of public funds, influence peddling, alteration of prices in tenders and money laundering.
According to the rulings issued, De la Torre would have paid Machín of Coalición Canaria (CC) certain bribes, called internally in the company as "revolutionary tax", to obtain various awards and contracts in the islands.
The company's turnover with the Cabildo conejero amounted to between 2004 and 2006 to about 700,000 euros and in return the councilor Machín received 24,000 euros in two cash commissions, one in 2004 for an amount of 6,000 euros, and another of 18,000 euros in 2005.
Meanwhile, the coordinator of Public Works Gran Canaria would have facilitated the award and execution of certain public contracts in the Island Corporation worth 150,000 euros. The first payment that Pérez received from de la Torre took place in March 2005 for 5,058 euros in exchange for granting the repair of a wall on the GC-851, a job that the company never did because the wall had already been repaired when the work was awarded.
The other payment, of 5,322.90 euros, was made in November 2005 and corresponded to Fitonovo's part of a bachelor party trip of the former official to Marbella and which was also paid for by two other companies, Api and Elsamex.
In total, the trip cost more than 15,900 euros and included all expenses, although the three companies recovered that amount through certifications of false works in the Cabildo of Gran Canaria validated by Pérez.
The judge who carried out the investigation in the National Court detected that on November 14, 2007, during the term in the Cabildo of Gran Canaria of the socialist José Miguel Pérez together with Nueva Canarias, De la Torre made a payment of more than 8,284 euros to an official whose identity is unknown.
