The lawyer Ignacio Calatayud, who charged hundreds of thousands of euros from the Cabildo and its dependent entities under the Presidency of Pedro San Ginés, has filed a claim in the Courts to demand another 82,000 euros from Inalsa, for an incident derived from the bankruptcy process for which he already invoiced the institution. The lawsuit for which he claims these fees was resolved in June 2019, but the bill was prepared a year and a half later - on January 7 - which was when he resorted to legal channels to demand payment.
Previously, he had been withholding information about this procedure from both the current government group of the Cabildo and the Insular Water Consortium, as this body warned more than a year ago. In fact, the Consortium then decided to remove Calatayud from this and other procedures, warning that it would take legal action against him and the attorneys.
In the case of this lawsuit with the UTE Edam Janubio - which arose within the Inalsa bankruptcy procedure - the ruling came just after San Ginés left the presidency of the Cabildo. Then, Ignacio Calatayud did address the new president, María Dolores Corujo, proposing the signing of an agreement with the company, which had lost the lawsuit and had to pay 1.6 million euros to Inalsa. The agreement, according to Calatayud in his bill, had been drafted and negotiated by himself.
“Faced with this proposal, and unaware of the background of the procedure, I requested that the necessary documentation be sent to me to assess it, but surprisingly, the documentation existing in the Consortium was incomplete and our successive requests to Calatayud and the attorneys to supplement it have been unsuccessful,” Corujo said in February 2020, when she warned of a “deliberate strategy of concealing information of vital importance to the public company.”
The manager of the Consortium appointed under the mandate of San Ginés, Domingo Pérez, was the one who demanded the documentation from the lawyer, and in the absence of a response, proposed removing both Calatayud and the attorneys, to appoint new professionals who could directly collect that documentation from the Courts of several procedures related to the Consortium and the Inalsa bankruptcy.
Now, Calatayud claims the payment of his alleged fees for that lawsuit, providing a bill for this purpose, but no document that proves how he was hired or for what amount. It should be remembered that Ignacio Calatayud has been investigated for years along with Pedro San Ginés for other payments he received from the Insular Water Council, in a separate piece of the case for the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant. And it is that the investigating judge, Jerónimo Alonso, also saw indications of a crime in the hiring of Calatayud to advise San Ginés on that decision, who has publicly and in the Courts acknowledged that he was a personal friend of this lawyer, whom he hired recurrently during his mandate.
Specifically, the magistrate pointed out that in the hiring of Calatayud, "the minimum procedural requirements" could have been omitted, thus avoiding "the controls that the procedure itself establishes", including avoiding possible “incompatibilities”. In that case of the Montaña Roja desalination plant, Calatayud was charging at the same time from Canal Gestión, which was the company to which the plants that he himself proposed to seize from Club Lanzarote were handed over. The piece for those payments was opened at the beginning of 2016 and passed to the Court of Judge Ricardo Fiestras, but in recent years no progress has been known in the investigation.
“Drafting and negotiation” of the mysterious agreement
Regarding the new payment that this same lawyer is now claiming from Inalsa, the bill includes not only his fees as a lawyer in the lawsuit, but also his work in the “drafting and negotiation” of the agreement that he intended to be signed with UTE Edam Janubio, against which he had litigated on behalf of the Consortium.
It was on January 20 when Ignacio Calatayud addressed the Mercantile Court Number 1 of Las Palmas, which was the one that resolved both the bankruptcy procedure - in which Edam Janubio was among the creditors - and this incident derived from it. In his writing, he recalled that the judgment of this incident was issued on June 27, 2019 and stated that his “client” had not paid him the bill, so he asked the Court to intervene to claim the payment from Inalsa.
However, that bill that he provided was dated only 13 days before, on January 7. In addition, the only document he presented to prove that he had previously delivered the invoice to Inalsa was an email he sent the next day - January 8 - to the secretary of the Board of Directors, Eugenia Torres, sending her the bill by mail. Only twelve days later, he raised his complaint to the Court for an alleged non-payment of a year and a half ago.
On March 30, the Court admitted this lawyer's account claim and in April issued a requirement certificate addressed to Inalsa, so that it would pay Calatayud “the claimed amount of 82,606 euros” or challenge the payment, “stating the reasons it had for it and providing, where appropriate, the documents it had at its disposal.”
