Businessman José Vicente Montesinos and the current manager of Lancelot Medios, Javier Betancort, have confessed this Thursday that they embezzled 310,000 euros from the Arrecife City Council, charging false invoices to the Consistory for services that had not actually been provided. The two have ratified their confession together with the former auditor of Arrecife, Carlos Sáenz, who has also acknowledged the facts at the beginning of the trial of one of the pieces of the Montecarlo case.
The session will now continue only with the fourth defendant, the lawyer Federico Toledo, who faces a request from the Prosecutor's Office for four years and ten months in prison for professional disloyalty and as a necessary collaborator in the crime of embezzlement. As for the other three, they have reached an agreement of conformity by which they have managed to reduce the penalties requested by the Public Prosecutor.
Initially, the Prosecutor's Office requested 15 and a half years in prison for Carlos Sáenz and Montesinos for continued crimes of embezzlement, prevarication, document forgery, bribery and money laundering; and 5 years and 10 months in prison for Javier Betancort for embezzlement, prevarication and document forgery.
For Carlos Sáenz, Betancort and Montesinos, this will be the second conviction within the Montecarlo case, since the three also confessed in the first piece that went to trial, for another embezzlement in the City Council of San Bartolomé. In that case, Javier Betancort intervened as Councilor of Finance of the Consistory, authorizing payments to Montesinos for services that had not been provided either. Later, after retiring from politics, the former PP councilor began working with this businessman and extended the plot to the Arrecife City Council.
In the procedure that has begun to be judged this Thursday, two other people who died during the investigation were investigated. One of them was the then mayor of Arrecife, Cándido Reguera, who was also Councilor of Finance of San Bartolomé for the PP when the Montesinos plot began, before Betancort came to office; and the other the former Councilor of Finance of Arrecife José Miguel Rodríguez. The former PIL councilor, who was convicted in other pieces of the Unión case, also confessed in his day the crimes in this piece of Montecarlo, stating that he had an agreement with the auditor, by which he "turned a blind eye" to payments like these, to companies of José Vicente Montesinos, while the auditor "did not object" to the payment of invoices to companies from which he and his party "benefited".
In addition, he detailed that although the payments were made in the name of Montesinos' companies, it was Javier Betancort who "ran those companies" and those contracts with the Arrecife City Council, and that Carlos Sáenz was the one who introduced them, telling him that he had to do "a favor". For this, in addition to alleged advisory services, they commissioned him to prepare tender documents whose prices "were exorbitant", and that were not even necessary or delivered. "I didn't see any specifications. They were never made. I only saw two drafts and they were the same, only the object changed," Rodríguez confessed during the investigation, leaving a testimony that this Thursday has been ratified by three of the defendants.
As for Federico Toledo, who was also a party colleague of Javier Betancort, he intervened as a lawyer representing the City Council, when Montesinos sued the Consistory, after the government group changed and the payment of his invoices was stopped. Although in this criminal procedure, initiated years later, it has been proven that the services were not even provided, the City Council lost those contentious lawsuits, in which it had Toledo as a lawyer.
Shortly after the investigation of the Montecarlo case began, the municipal secretary, Asenet Padrón, reported that four people, including Federico Toledo, had entered her office in her absence and had access to files that the Prosecutor's Office had already requested. In addition, she warned that documents had disappeared from that file. In addition to Toledo, according to what Asenet Padrón reported in her day, the then mayor, Cándido Reguera, the former Councilor for Human Resources, Nayra Callero, and the then deputy mayor, José Montelongo, who is accused and awaiting trial in two other pieces of the Montecarlo case, were in her office.
