The lawyer Ignacio Calatayud has tried to "circumvent the law" to charge an "undue" and "disproportionate" invoice to Inalsa, in an "illegitimate attempt to benefit from public funds". That is what the company dependent on the Water Consortium has warned, which has rejected the claim for fees presented by this lawyer before the Commercial Court that handled the Inalsa bankruptcy proceedings.
With this new fee, Calatayud intends to collect another 82,000 euros for an incident derived from that contest, for which he already received 156,450 euros, which Inalsa defends included the entire procedure. In addition, they question the method used by Ignacio Calatayud, going directly to the Court, as if there had been a default, when he had not even formally presented the invoice to Inalsa.
“Calatayud's appeal to the Fee Swearing procedure can be understood as an attempt to circumvent the actions of the legal and intervention services of the Lanzarote Water Consortium, which is responsible for the administration of Inalsa by delegation,” they point out from this body. And they recall that “the correct presentation of the invoice, through the electronic headquarters or the entry registry, would have meant the opening of a file and the verification of the correctness of the procedure and, in that case, the Consortium's services would have warned that the invoice was not appropriate”.
However, Calatayud did not present any invoice for a year and a half, despite the fact that the incident for which he now intends to collect was resolved in June 2019. The first step was taken last January but not through official channels, but by sending the invoice by email to the Council secretary. Only twelve days later, he went to the Court, using a procedure created to guarantee the collection of lawyers when their client does not comply with the payment.
The contract included “the processing of the entire procedure”
In its response to this claim, Inalsa maintains that Ignacio Calatayud Prats was appointed as a lawyer “for everything related to the Bankruptcy Procedure” by agreement adopted by the Board of Directors on January 18, 2010. Under that agreement, the then president of the Board of Directors, Pedro San Ginés, signed a contract with Calatayud, for an amount of 186,000 euros (almost 200,000 with IGIC) in which it was stated: “This budget includes the processing of the entire procedure until its completion in said judicial instance. The travel expenses and other expenses that may occur in the execution of the work of this assignment will be considered included in the fees previously budgeted.”
That contract signed with Pedro San Ginés, who was a personal friend of Ignacio Calatayud, broke down the budget into three chapters, and set fees of 86,000 euros for what is known as the “common phase” of the creditors' meeting, which is the main phase of the procedure, and which were already fully paid. In addition, the document also contemplated the fees for the following phases of the creditors' meeting, establishing 40,000 euros for the “agreement phase” and another 40,000 euros for the “liquidation phase”, which were also paid to the lawyer after a modification of the budget signed on April 23, 2012 by San Ginés, which established the final amount of these last two phases at a total of 64,200 euros.
“Inalsa's opposition to Calatayud's attempt at undue collection is therefore based on the existence of a contract that covered all the activities to be carried out in the bankruptcy procedure and on the fact that the amounts budgeted in the aforementioned contract have been fully paid to the indicated lawyer, who has been paid a total of 156,450 euros for his intervention in the contest,” the company insists.
Option b, that there was an “irregular verbal contract” with San Ginés
In addition, Inalsa adds that even if the defense of this bankruptcy incident had been entrusted to him separately from the rest of the bankruptcy, the 82,000 euros claimed by Calatayud are also “disproportionate” and would also not be covered by any contract, because there is no other subsequent contract.
For this reason, the Consortium insists that if that invoice had been presented through the established channels, it would also have been rejected for this reason. “If it had been understood that it was not included in the original contract, the Inalsa administration should have pointed out that there was no contract to protect the provision of these services, since it was a verbal contract, an absolutely irregular circumstance,” he emphasizes. And it is that the Public Sector Contracts Law does not allow direct contracts for an amount greater than 15,000 euros.
“In the event that it was understood that the services provided by Calatayud were covered by an alleged and irregular verbal contract, San Ginés would have violated the limit established for minor contracting, and should have resorted to contracting formulas that allowed free competition,” he warns.
A “disproportionate” amount
On the other hand, Inalsa underlines the “disproportion” between the price that was agreed for the entire common phase of the bankruptcy procedure, which is the longest and most complex, and what the same lawyer is now claiming for an incident within that same bankruptcy, despite the difference in the amounts that were at stake, which is another of the factors that mark the defense fees.
In the case of the common phase, it was budgeted at 86,000 euros, in the case of a procedure with an amount of more than 40 million euros, and now Calatayud intends to collect 82,000 euros for an incident whose amount amounts to only 1.6 million euros. “The disproportion is evident,” they insist from Inalsa.
To support this, they also refer to Calatayud's intervention in this incident, which was specified, fundamentally, in two writings. “In the first of these, of two and a half pages, he limited himself to adhering to what was stated in the claim filed by the bankruptcy administrators. In the second, he limited himself to drafting three pages while the writing of the bankruptcy administration extended over 23 pages with abundant jurisprudential doctrine and legal foundation,” they emphasize. In addition to those two writings, they point out that “there are some others of a procedural nature without sufficient entity to justify the very high fees he claims.”
The fee swearing procedure
Although the public company has already presented a writing in the Court opposing Calatayud's claim for collection, it also warns that its defense has informed it that “there is a risk that Inalsa will be forced to pay the amount unduly claimed by Calatayud.”
And it is that the swearing of accounts to which he has resorted is an exceptional mechanism by which a lawyer can demand from his client the payment of an invoice in a summary manner, through a procedure that only allows discussing the appropriateness of the amount of the fees required, without being able to oppose the attempt to collect the disagreement with the work carried out or the incidents that may have occurred in the development of the contract.
However, Inalsa anticipates that in the event that this occurs, they would then undertake another procedure “through which the public company could be compensated for this undue collection.”
“The public company will act with the diligence and forcefulness necessary to guarantee the defense of Inalsa's interests against this illegitimate attempt by Ignacio Calatayud to benefit from public funds with the complicity or, at least, the tolerance of Pedro San Ginés,” warned the president, María Dolores Corujo.
