The former mayor of Arrecife (2001 and 2007), María Isabel Déniz, declared this Friday before the court of the Las Palmas Court that she is being tried for alleged crimes of illicit association and bribery, among others, that she saw "normal" to receive gifts from companies with which the City Council had ties.
Déniz, one of the main defendants in the plot known as Operación Jable - the last separate piece to be tried within the Unión case - has only answered questions from her lawyer on the second day of the trial in which she appears as a co-defendant along with ten other people, including council officials, heads of two companies and political leaders of the time, such as Dimas Martín.
"At the time when I was mayor, it was normal to receive certain gifts on certain dates," she defended, although she later acknowledged that, over time, her perception "has changed" and now she sees that she was doing "something wrong".
Déniz says she paid part of the value of the gifts she received from companies - in this case, gifts from the companies Tecmed, later Urbaser, and FCC are being judged - to "repair some of the damage" she had done and acknowledges that it was not right, while also showing herself to be "repentant".
Among those gifts with which she was presented, she has detailed scarves, pashminas, bags or invitations to cultural and sporting events, including tickets to the Santiago Bernabéu box.
On the other hand, she denies having received prominent gifts in the accusation of the Anti-Corruption prosecutor, Javier Ródensa, such as a Rolex watch or a designer piece of furniture valued at 1,200 euros.
"Mr. Jacinto (Álvarez, Urbaser's delegate in Lanzarote and also accused) can say what he wants, and we all know what that man did, buy gifts for his relatives and charge them to the politicians," he alleged.
In addition, she has denied having had any kind of "preferential treatment" with the companies that submitted bids for public contracts from the City Council, that they have given her envelopes or amounts of cash, and that a trip to Tanzania that she made "for personal reasons" was paid for by Tecmed.
As for other trips to Madrid paid for by that same company, and another to Morocco paid for by FCC, she has admitted that the former took place, but that they were for work days under her functions as mayor.
Regarding the one in Morocco, in which she went with several relatives, she clarified that she "never" wanted to accept it as a gift, especially because she did not want to involve her relatives, so she tried to pay for it.
This Friday, the person who was the general secretary of the Arrecife City Council at the time of the events, Felipe Fernández Camero, also testified before the court, presided over by Judge Oscarina Naranjo, who denied the accusations against him and that he had anything to do with the fixing of the Tecmed contract for the collection of solid urban waste in the capital of Lanzarote.
Regarding the testimony offered on Wednesday by another of the accused, the head of the Technical Office, Juan Rafael Arrocha, he has flatly rejected everything related to his participation in the fixing: "The head of the Technical Office said nothing but lies; induced lies, in addition."
According to Fernández Camero, for whom the Prosecutor's Office is seeking sentences totaling 11 and a half years in prison, "it is not possible to review in a couple of days" all the documentation of the companies' proposals for a contract such as the one that is the object of the alleged irregularities.
"If Tecmed came to know the content of the proposals, I suppose they could have had it in any stealthy way," he ventured, and then stated that it is "impossible" for them to obtain the data from the closed and protected envelopes.
Because, he added, "if the envelopes are opened, everything that the bidders present is destroyed, and that cannot be replaced."
In the session, the former mayor's husband and Dimas Martín's wife were also called to testify, for the prosecutor participants for lucrative purposes of the events being judged, who have availed themselves of their right not to testify, while Ródens has asked that the statement in instruction of another of the accused, already deceased, Matías Curbelo, be read.
The trial will continue on Monday with the first testimonies.
