Former Cabildo councilor Sergio Machín will be in the dock this Monday to face the first trial of the "Fitonovo" or "Madeja" case. It will be the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court who will begin to judge this case of corruption, an infrastructure formed around the company Fitonovo for the obtaining contracts irregularly through the payment of bribes to authorities and public employees, an action that lasted for more than 15 years in different territories.
The Prosecutor's Office accuses in this first piece that is going to be judged the attorney of Fitonovo in the Canary Islands Adolfo de la Torre; the Councilor for Public Works of the Cabildo of Lanzarote Sergio Machín; the engineer of the Cabildo of Las Palmas José Ulises Pérez González; the head of the Conservation and Exploitation of Roads Section of the Junta de Extremadura José María Pizarro; the general secretary of the Andalusian Water Agency Carlos Francisco Irigoyen; José Francisco Cazorla, official of the Ministry of Development and Housing of the Junta de Andalucía; and the head of the Highway Service of this last council José María López Torrego.
The indictment is also directed against managers of other companies that were also awarded public contracts in the Canary Islands and would also have paid bribes: these are Rubén Coba (Api Movilidad); Gustavo Adolfo Gómez Jiménez (Elsamex). The Public Prosecutor's Office requests sentences for the accused of between three and five years in prison for crimes of bribery and prevarication.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the company Fitonovo carried out a planned activity aimed at awarding public contracts by fraudulent means. Thus, its management created an "operational and accounting infrastructure" to obtain irregular public contracts, enabling the company's commercial structure to form a "network of contacts with corrupt officials" who facilitated said contracting and creating a "parallel accounting that was nourished by false invoicing to, among other purposes, finance the payment of bribes to public officials." At the same time, the writing continues, it created a corporate network that, in parallel to a legal commercial activity, hoarded public contracts using illicit means, causing serious damage to the public interest, since "they perverted numerous contracting procedures to the detriment of public coffers."
Request for 4 years in prison and ten years of disqualification for Sergio Machín
Four years in prison, ten years of disqualification, a fine of 6,000 euros and the return of the 24,000 euros that he allegedly received in bribes.That is what the Prosecutor's Office is asking for for the former Cabildo councilor Sergio Machín, who was arrested in November 2014 within a case against corruption at the national level, which is now about to go to trial. Machín, who had previously been a councilor of the PIL, was at the time of his arrest spokesman for the Canarian Coalition in the Island Corporation, and after being released on charges he continued to hold that position until the end of the mandate.
The arrest of Sergio Machín occurred by order of the judge of Seville Mercedes Alaya, but the case later passed to the National Court, which is the one that has already ordered the opening of oral trial within this piece of the Fitonovo case, which will put Sergio Machín and eight other people in the dock. La Voz has now had access to both that order and the indictment of the Public Prosecutor's Office, which asks that the former councilor be convicted of a continued crime of bribery, for receiving bribes in exchange for the awarding of Cabildo works.
In addition, the Central Court of Instruction Number 5 of the National Court has imposed a bond of 32,000 euros on the former Lanzarote councilor, to ensure the amounts that he would have to respond to both in terms of fine and return of the profits of the crime in case of conviction.