The former president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, sent a statement on Monday night to give his version of what another of the defendants in the first day of the trial for the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant “meant to say” in his statement, which could open an important gap between his defense and that of the former secretary of the Cabildo, Francisco Perdomo. In addition, he explains why he did not answer the prosecutor's questions during the hearing, assuring that he did so to “speed up the trial.”
“Pedro San Ginés has not responded to the Public Prosecutor because he does not have the burden of proof of the accusation because he does not accuse,” he maintains in a statement that he signs on behalf of his defense. “This helps to speed up the trial, eliminating unnecessary parts and focusing on the witnesses and evidence that are of interest to the defense,” he adds, after his client was the only defendant who did not answer the prosecutor's questions.
As for the rest of the statement, it focuses on refuting what was published by several media outlets - and in particular by La Voz de Lanzarote - about the statement of another of the defendants, the former secretary of the Cabildo, Francisco Perdomo. However, although he attacks the media, the statement is a direct attack on Perdomo and his statement.
“It is impossible for the secretary to have found out about the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant through the press, as some media claim, since he signed the seizure resolution as a certifying officer on the same day that San Ginés did, that is, the day before the material fact of said seizure,” he points out in this regard, despite the fact that it is not "the media" who affirms this, but Perdomo himself, who gave that answer to questions from the prosecutor.
Specifically, after hearing what the alleged “verbal advice” that the former secretary gave to San Ginés before the seizure consisted of, the prosecutor asked him “how he intervened afterwards.” “I learned through the press and colleagues that it had been seized,” Francisco Perdomo responded, as La Voz had reported in its chronicle.
“In any case, he will have meant to say that he found out about that material act through the press,” adds the statement sent by San Ginés, interpreting the statement that the secretary has made in the trial. However, although he had the opportunity to do so, the former president's defense did not ask Francisco Perdomo any questions during the hearing: Not even to clarify that statement that he had made to questions from the Prosecutor's Office, and in which they consider that he had “meant to say” something else.
In fact, none of the defense lawyers has asked any questions to the rest of the defendants and each one has limited themselves to addressing their client. And San Ginés' lawyer has not asked Perdomo about the document that he sent to the media on Monday night along with this statement, to argue that Pancho Perdomo also signed the resolution by which the former president ordered the seizure.
Indeed, the signatures of both appear in that document, although San Ginés' defense had not made reference to it during the first day of the trial. And Francisco Perdomo has not spoken about it during his statement either, in which he has only answered questions from his lawyer and the Public Prosecutor, refusing to answer those of the popular accusation. Like San Ginés, Perdomo is accused of a crime of malfeasance, and has based his statement on defending that he did not intervene in the seizure ordered by the president.
Regarding his advice, both to questions from the Prosecutor's Office and from his lawyer, he has stated that it was “generic”, “informal” and “improvised”, and that he “had not studied the file nor did he know the internal details” of the case. “He did not ask me for a report,” he has stated emphatically.
“It is absolutely false that the secretary denied San Ginés in the trial. On the contrary, he confirmed what he had already said in the instruction process, that is, that this verbal advice was prior,” maintains the former president's defense, which has not asked Perdomo a single question during the trial to corroborate this extreme, especially when both in the trial and in the instruction phase he totally relativized that alleged advice.
In fact, in the statement that the former secretary made during the instruction, and that San Ginés has also sent along with his statement, he stated that they had only spoken about this issue on one occasion “for a brief period of time” and that he did not believe “that with his advice he was forming the will of the president”, who “had his private advisors”, referring specifically to Ignacio Calatayud.
“His prior advice should not have been so generic and improvised, when in the instruction phase, and in response to a question from the president about the measures to be adopted, he referred to various jurisprudence in the Supreme and Constitutional Courts and to specific legal norms that dealt with the problem raised, specifically the temporary requisition or the intervention of companies producing and distributing water. And more explicitly, he responded to the president that 'the provision of that service could be seized within the framework of understanding that they were public domain endowments',” argues San Ginés' defense in his press release.
In the parts that he omits from that statement, and that Pedro San Ginés has not sent underlined although they appear in the same writing, Francisco Perdomo also said that he “would not have adopted the measure that the president adopted without having a prior written legal report”, that he “would have been supported by prior written legal reports” and that when he gave his opinion he did so “with the reservations that it was a verbal report.”
In addition, he also stated that what he proposed was “to proceed with the opening of a sanctioning file aimed at the recovery of the public domain and that a closure of the illegal activity would proceed as a consequence of the file”, but not that he would adopt a precautionary measure ordering the seizure before even resolving the file, especially when the Council did not have the powers to order the closure of a plant, since those powers depend on the Government of the Canary Islands.
In the same statement, San Ginés' defense insists that the signature that Francisco Perdomo later put on the resolution ordering the seizure “is not a trivial matter because, since he was responsible for the legal advice of the Island Water Council, as he himself has stated, he did not make any warning of illegality.” In this regard, Perdomo did speak in response to questions from his lawyer without making direct allusion to the signature that he had put on that resolution.
Specifically, his defense has asked him to clarify if as secretary he was obliged to make "warnings of legality" when they did not request a report from him. "It is true that before we had an obligation to warn, but that is no longer the case. The warnings of legality disappeared many years ago," Perdomo responded.
In his statement, San Ginés' defense also insists that in the trial “only two natural persons are accusing, to whom no judicial resolution has authorized them to be accusing parties”, despite the fact that both the Court of Instruction and the Provincial Court and the Public Prosecutor's Office have repeatedly pointed out the contrary, clarifying that those who appeared as a popular accusation from the beginning were the former councilors of Podemos Carlos Meca and Pablo Ramírez as natural persons. However, San Ginés' defense insists that it is a “mistake” and recalls that they raised it again this Monday in the preliminary questions before the start of the hearing, when they unsuccessfully requested that the trial not continue.
