The Provincial Court has rejected Javier Betancort's last attempt to avoid entering prison for the Montecarlo case, in which he and two other defendants confessed to having looted some 300,000 euros from the Arrecife City Council. Last October, the Second Section of the Court dismissed his request to suspend the execution of the sentence, and in December rejected his appeal against that resolution.
However, although that order was already final, Betancort's defense announced another appeal, now for cassation before the Supreme Court. This has delayed the execution of the sentence, but the Court has just responded by recalling that no further appeals were possible against the last resolution, so it dismisses it outright and orders that the execution of the sentence continue.
Meanwhile, another of those convicted in that part of the Montecarlo case, the businessman José Vicente Montesinos, has already voluntarily entered prison to serve the sentence, specifically in the Villena penitentiary center, in Alicante.
Both Montesinos and Betancort, who was a PP councilor in San Bartolomé and is currently the manager of Lancelot Medios, had already been convicted in another part of Montecarlo focused on that municipality, where Betancort was the Finance councilor and authorized payments for services not provided to Montesinos' companies. Later, after leaving politics, Javier Betancort began working for this businessman and they transferred the same plot to the Arrecife City Council, which was investigated and tried in another part of this same case.
In both trials, José Vicente Montesinos and Javier Betancort confessed to the crimes and managed to reduce the penalties that the Prosecutor's Office initially requested, after reaching a conformity agreement. In Betancort's case, this meant reducing the prison sentence to less than two years -specifically to a year and a half-, which opened the door to suspending the execution of the sentence. However, although he achieved it with the first sentence, his attempt has not prospered with this second one. And the reason is that he has not paid the civil liability that that sentence also implied, and which he had committed to pay when accepting the conformity agreement.
"He does not intend to pay what was defrauded"
"Not only has said responsibility not been paid, but it is already announced that it will not be paid", the Provincial Court stated in the order in which it rejected his request to suspend entry into prison. "The appellant from the beginning does not intend to pay what was defrauded, since he does not even speak of partial compliance. It does not appear that he has paid any amount, or that he has offered assets for payment, or that he has tried to obtain some type of financing to comply with civil liability, or that he has in some way shown his willingness to pay. This passivity of the convict simply reveals his will not to pay anything at all of the 287,175 euros of public money defrauded, and therefore one of the necessary conditions for suspending the sentence is not met," the order added.
In the case of José Vicente Montesinos, his sentence did exceed two years in prison -in fact, he was sentenced to three years and four months in prison-, but he also requested that the execution be suspended, alleging that he was convicted of more than one crime and that none of the sentences individually exceeded those two years. However, the Court also rejected his claim, not only because he has not complied with the payment of civil liability either, but also because of the seriousness of the crimes and his recidivism.
Along with José Vicente Montesinos and Javier Betancort, in this part of Montecarlo, the former auditor of Arrecife and San Bartolomé, Carlos Sáenz, was also convicted again, who was already in prison serving other previous sentences from the Unión case. In his case, after also confessing to the crimes, in this part he was sentenced to three years, three months and eight days in prison, more than six and a half years of disqualification and the payment of a fine of 150,000 euros for crimes of embezzlement of public funds, prevarication, falsification of an official document, bribery and money laundering. In addition, he was ordered to return the embezzled money jointly with the other two defendants.
In this part, two other people were also investigated, the former mayor of Arrecife Cándido Reguera (PP) -who was Betancort's party colleague and was also charged in the San Bartolomé part, where he was Finance councilor before Betancort- and the former Finance councilor of Arrecife José Miguel Rodríguez (PIL), but both died during the investigation. Before dying, Rodríguez also confessed to having authorized the payments of those invoices knowing that the services had not actually been provided.
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 him "a favor". For this, in addition to alleged advisory services, they commissioned him to prepare tender specifications whose prices "were exorbitant", and that were not even necessary nor were they ever 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 was later confirmed with the confession in the trial of the three defendants.