“It was an illegal act and the payment should have been stopped”. This is how forcefully one of the two official experts who have testified in the trial for the alleged looting of almost one million euros (from two decades ago), with the payments from the Yaiza City Council to the lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero, has stated.
“The established legal procedure was totally and absolutely disregarded”, the other expert has pointed out, who has stressed that in his “40 years” of professional practice, he has never seen “a rule” that covers the actions of the accused.
Enrique Salvador Villar is an official of the Canary Islands Court of Auditors, while the other expert, Domingo García, is an official of the State Comptroller General. Both issued reports at the request of the Court during the investigation of this case, and this Wednesday they have ratified their conclusions before the First Section of the Provincial Court.
“It cannot be that the amount of the contract is determined by the contractor by submitting the invoice”, Villar stressed. And it is that both have agreed that the payments were made without a contract or a prior budget. Not even a verification that the service had actually been provided.
“Invoices were submitted and the payment was ordered without further ado”, the official of the State Comptroller General stated.
“There was no file at all”
Both experts have agreed that there was “clearly a splitting of contracts, expressly prohibited by law”, in order to directly award those services to Fernández Camero. Thus, they acted as if they were minor contracts, which do not require calling a contest.
In any case, these awards do require that there be at least a prior budget, which is not included in any of the invoices that were paid to Camero; and a needs report, to justify the hiring. “There was no file at all”, they stressed.
In addition, they have also specified that a minor contract “cannot exceed one year”, because it is used “for exceptional cases, not for recurring or periodic contracts”. In the case of Fernández Camero, this case investigates the invoices he charged from Yaiza for 11 years, some monthly as alleged advice to the City Council, and the rest for intervening in lawsuits as a lawyer.
Among the invoices that the lawyer charged to the City Council, they have highlighted several of between 150,000 and 200,000 euros, even charging up to three for those amounts in the same month. “The amounts of the minor contract were greatly exceeded”, the experts insisted. In fact, each of those invoices alone multiplied it by ten.
To this, they have added that afterwards no one gave their approval to those invoices to prove that the service had actually been provided. “The only procedure was that the mayor, before the secretary, signed the payment order”, Domingo García responded, specifying that in the case of invoices for representation in lawsuits, not even data of the procedure, nor of the characteristics of the same, nor its duration, nor details of whether the case had gone to trial or a sentence had been issued were indicated.
“Not even the verification of the provision of the service is complied with”, the expert has questioned, who has insisted that there was also no previously “any document that says what service is going to be contracted and at what price”, as required by law.
¿The risk? “To pay more and to pay for services that have not been proven to have been provided”, he responded to questions from the lawyer of the popular accusation.
“That plenary agreement would not change my opinion at all”
In addition, they have explained that even if they had followed the legal procedure that corresponded to those amounts, with a public offer of free competition, the advisory contract could have had a maximum duration of four years, extendable to another two. That is, six in total.
However, from the first day of the trial and also during the declaration of these experts, the defenses have clung to a plenary agreement of Yaiza from 1980, under the Mayoralty of Honorio García Bravo, by which it was approved to hire Felipe Fernández Camero as advisor to the City Council, for a monthly amount of 50,000 pesetas.
In this regard, the defense lawyers have questioned that the experts did not know about that plenary agreement when they issued their reports, since they maintain that the hiring began there, and that all Reyes did was maintain it.
“That plenary agreement would not change my opinion at all. I would still think that they are verbal contracts”, Enrique Salvador Villar responded sharply, to questions from Fernández Camero's daughter, Juana Fernández de las Heras, who represents the company Adelfas 24 as a civil party.
“The contract has to be made for a certain object and put out to tender. Not for an indeterminate amount of 50,000 pesetas”, added the other expert, who also referred to payments of up to 46 million pesetas in a single month.
In their statement, both have also insisted that a service contract, even if the legal procedure had been followed, could only have had a maximum duration of six years, after which it would have to be put out to tender again.
In addition, the official of the State Comptroller General has pointed out that his report focuses on the payments that Camero received since 1996, when Reyes' Mayoralty began, because in the information that the Court sent him, which is what he received from the City Council, “they did not provide anything” related to payments he received in the previous ten years, despite the defenses alleging that it was a “inherited” hiring.
“It had no legal fit in 1980 or in 2022”
Regarding the other argument of the defenses, which appeal to the fact that this type of direct awards without a contract were common in the city councils, the expert of the State Comptroller General has also been blunt: “I have been in the Court of Auditors for 30 years and 40 years in practice and if that is the case, it does not mean that it was done well”.
This is how he responded to Reyes' lawyer, Pablo Luna, who in his question had stated that he himself was hired in a similar way years ago in a consistory. “It would be done in some city councils, but it had no legal fit. Neither in 1980 nor in 2022”, the expert sentenced.
“If some did it, it was by skipping the law, because in 40 years I have never seen any rule that says that you can hire verbally, indefinitely, with monthly payments and without a budget”, he added.
To this they have added that the minor contract, which is how it was treated, does not admit extensions, nor price revisions (which skyrocketed over the years). And also that “it is prohibited to hire people involved in incompatibility”, as was the case of Felipe Fernández Camero, who was at the same time secretary of the Arrecife City Council. “The contracts would be null and void”, the expert warned, recalling that Camero was sanctioned and removed from that position by Public Function, for a serious and a very serious offense, by combining it with his participation in two companies.
From that sanction, the Yaiza City Council began to make the payments to Camero in the name of his company, Adelfas 24, but the expert has stressed that “the incompatibility extends to the administrators” of the companies.
A third expert, the only one from the defense
Only one more expert has intervened in the trial, in this case from the party and not an official of the administration. The one who has contributed it has been the defense of Antonio Fernández, who hired him to issue a report for this case.
In that opinion that he has defended during the hearing, Juan Zornoza has focused almost exclusively on the role of that accused, who authorized payments to Camero in the periods in which he replaced the secretary-intervenor, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes. And in his opinion, the behavior of Antonio Fernández does not deserve “reproach”.
Among other things, he has defended that the work of Intervention is “very complex” and that an accidental intervenor by substitution should not be “required with the same rigor as someone who has the qualification for it”.
In addition, to justify the lack of supervision of these payments, he has defended that they obeyed a “labor relationship” of Camero with the City Council. Other defenses have also clung to this “nuance”, and especially that of Felipe Fernández Camero, because a labor relationship is not governed by the law of public contracts.
“¿Would you qualify it as a labor relationship?”, the lawyer of the accusation then asked him, reminding him that he was testifying as an expert in court. “I am not a labor lawyer”, he ended up responding, after trying to avoid the answer. Then, he added that “in his opinion” that is what “can be understood” from another Intervention report.
For their part, the two public officials who have testified as experts have also been asked about this issue, and both have flatly rejected that the payments to Camero could respond to a labor relationship.
Among other things, Enrique Salvador Villar has stressed that a worker cannot be hired “without a selective process” with publicity and concurrence of “equality, capacity and merit”. In addition, he has highlighted aspects such as that it would involve paying the Social Security of that worker, and also that he had a physical place of work in the City Council and a set schedule. “¿Is it a labor relationship or something that resembles it?”, the lawyer of the accusation insisted. “No”, he responded emphatically.
Two witnesses cited by the defense to try to compare
On this second day of the trial, two witnesses cited by the defense of Fernández Camero have also testified. Both are lawyers and worked for the Yaiza City Council, between 1991 and 2003, initially under the Mayoralty of Honorio García Bravo and then a few more years under the mandate of Reyes.
Specifically, they have explained that the City Council hired three lawyers who shared an office to carry out civil and criminal proceedings of the City Council, which did not have its own lawyers. In their case, they have explained that they charged a fixed monthly amount, of about 166,000 pesetas each. In addition, one of them has stated that “two or three lawsuits” that were more complex and that ended when the fixed relationship with the City Council had already ended, he invoiced them separately.
With these testimonies, the defense intended to compare this situation with that of Felipe Fernández Camero
“¿Did they unilaterally increase the amount they charged in those years?”, “¿were they involved in any cause of incompatibility?”, “¿did you unilaterally decide the amount of the fee at your free will?”, the prosecutor has been asking both of them, to highlight the differences. Then, she has asked them questions about the facts themselves that are being judged, related to Fernández Camero and his alleged “connivance” with the other three defendants to “plunder” public funds from the City Council for services that “have not been proven” to have been provided. “I don't know”, “I ignore it”, “I don't know”, they have been responding. “Well, there are no more questions”, the prosecutor has concluded.
