The businessman José Vicente Montesinos and the former PP councilor of San Bartolomé and current manager of Lancelot Medios, Javier Betancort, will have to enter prison imminently. This has been ordered by the Second Section of the Provincial Court, which has refused to suspend the fulfillment of the sentence to which they were condemned in one of the trials of the Montecarlo case, for looting more than 300,000 euros from the Arrecife City Council.
The two had already been convicted in a first piece, focused on the San Bartolomé City Council, where Betancort was a 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 piece of this same case.
In both trials, José Vicente Montesinos and Javier Betancort confessed to the crimes and managed to reduce the penalties initially requested by the Prosecutor's Office, after reaching a conformity agreement. In the case of Betancort, that 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 the second.
On October 26, the Court already rejected his request to suspend the execution of the prison sentence, and has now just dismissed the appeal he filed against that decision. The reason is that he has not paid the civil liability that also implied that sentence, and that he had committed to pay when accepting the conformity agreement.
"Not only has said responsibility not been paid, but it is already announced that it will not be paid", the Provincial Court points out about Javier Betancort. "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 his payment, or that he has tried to obtain any type of financing to comply with civil liability, or that in some way he has 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 to suspend the sentence is not met", the order states, dated last Tuesday the 15th.
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 asked for the execution to be suspended, alleging that he was convicted of more than one crime and that none of the penalties individually exceeded those two years. However, the Court has also rejected his claim, not only because he has not complied with the payment of civil liability, but also because of the seriousness of the crimes and his recidivism.
"The arguments that led to denying the suspension of the imposed sentence have not been distorted at all", the order states, rejecting his appeal. And those arguments are based on the Penal Code, which allows the suspension of the execution of sentences of less than two years in prison but provided that "the personal circumstances of the offender, the nature of the act, his conduct and, in particular, the effort to repair the damage caused, so advise".
Thus, although the Chamber admits that each penalty could be analyzed individually within that same sentence, it adds that "against him" plays the fact that the total sentence was three years, three months and 14 days in prison; and also his criminal record. In fact, he emphasizes that this is his "second conviction for similar crimes in just over a year".
To this he adds that "the seriousness of the conduct of José Vicente Montesinos Ramírez is unquestionable, and this is reflected in the account of proven facts of the sentence", which was recognized by himself during the trial. And also that -like Javier Betancort- he has not even complied with the payment of the amount he committed to return to the Arrecife City Council.
Montesinos had to answer for the sum of 310,544 euros, and the Court concludes that his "passivity" towards the payment "simply reveals his will not to pay" that money, which was embezzled from the Arrecife City Council. Therefore, as with Javier Betancort, he rejects his claims, with an order that is already final and against which no further appeals are possible.
Along with José Vicente Montesinos and Javier Betancort, in this piece of Montecarlo, the former auditor of Arrecife and San Bartolomé, Carlos Sáenz, who was already in prison serving other previous sentences of the Unión case, was also convicted again. In his case, after also confessing to the crimes, in this piece 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, forgery in official document, bribery and money laundering. In addition, he was sentenced to return jointly with the other two defendants the embezzled money.
In this piece, two other people were also investigated, the former mayor of Arrecife Cándido Reguera (PP) and the former Finance Councilor 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 specifications for tenders whose prices "were exorbitant", and that were not even necessary or were delivered. "I did not see any specification. 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.
