Jury finds three defendants in the first part of the Mediador case guilty of bribery

The popular jury of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has found the three defendants in the first part of the Mediador case – intermediary Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, former Civil Guard General Francisco Espinosa, and businessman Antonio Bautista – guilty of bribery. The verdict was announced tonight after the trial that began on January 22, which dealt with alleged bribes to secure contracts for solar panel supplies. Following the verdict, the prosecution is seeking the maximum penalty of one year, Bautista's defense attorney would accept nine months, and the former Civil Guard's attorney requests the minimum sentence. Navarro Tacoronte's lawyer advocates for five months and believes his sentence should be suspended given his lack of similar offenses and cleared criminal record, although the prosecutor opposes this due to his involvement in other parts of the scheme. The jury is also not in favor of granting pardons to any of them, nor is the Public Prosecutor's Office. The jury deemed the 12 questioned payments proven, five with a majority of seven votes and the rest unanimously. During the oral hearing, one of the experts, a member of the Civil Guard, asserted that Espinosa was an active member of the force when the events occurred, and therefore could not receive any gifts or money in exchange for services. In Navarro Tacoronte's case, it is confirmed that he acted as an intermediary between the other two to facilitate the solar panel businesses that Bautista wanted to implement on the islands. In the first part of the case, now judged, it is stated that the intermediary contacted Bautista by phone in August 2020 and then introduced him to the former general, with whom Navarro Tacoronte had become friends around that time. In September, Bautista traveled to the islands to meet the intermediary and, without having met Espinosa yet, sent him a box of Canarian cigars. This was followed by about ten meetings in restaurants where the same dynamic repeated: the businessman paid for everything. A key event in the scheme, which the verdict considers another act of bribery, is the weekend trip to Fuerteventura in November 2020 involving the three men and a friend of Espinosa. The purpose was for the former Civil Guard to give a talk and for the businessman to meet the woman, as she was going to work for his company, just as Espinosa would do upon his retirement. In this case, the businessman also covered all expenses for plane tickets, hotel, and car rental, and the alleged collection of 3,000 euros for the conference, for which there is no record, was considered by the prosecutor to be an excuse to justify the trip, a theory supported by the jury. When Bautista realized in January that it was impossible to achieve any results, he finally closed off any possibility of dealing with the intermediary. In conclusion of the scheme, Bautista felt deceived and defrauded, Espinosa claims that at the time he was the director of a Foundation and no longer a public official, and Navarro Tacoronte declared that he always acted as a private individual performing commercial functions. None of these arguments were accepted by the popular jury in their verdict. The case came to light when, at the end of January 2023, Navarro Tacoronte was arrested, accused of appropriating the card of a high-ranking official from the Tenerife Island Council, which led to the opening of a parallel case for false reporting against him. After several days in custody, the intermediary confessed that his mobile phones contained thousands of files of conversations, videos, and images that would demonstrate a corruption scheme involving former national deputy Bernardo Fuentes and his nephew, Taishet Fuentes, former Director General of Agriculture.