The former secretary of the Yaiza City Council, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, who already has four convictions for urban planning prevarication, embezzlement and document forgery, testified this Thursday as a defendant in the trial for the payments he authorized to Felipe Fernández Camero, from whom he defended that he learned "a lot".
In his statement, Bartolomé Fuentes justified the million euros that Camero charged from the City Council, among other things, for the advice he gave him. "I learned a lot at that time. And I am very grateful to Mr. Fernández Camero and my colleagues for the training I received", he said in what is, at least, his sixth criminal trial.
Precisely because of that "advice" he gave to both the secretary and the mayor, José Francisco Reyes, Camero was charged in the main piece of the Yate case, as the alleged mastermind and "inducer" of the criminal conduct of both. However, while Reyes and Bartolomé Fuentes were convicted and confessed their crimes in that case -for the massive granting of illegal licenses in Playa Blanca-, the charges against Camero were eventually dropped before the trial, as no evidence of his "advice" was found.
That is why this new piece was opened, which has now come to trial, in which the three are accused of embezzlement, for the money that Fernández Camero charged from the Consistory. "It is absolutely false to say that he did not perform any service for the City Council," the former secretary-intervenor defended this Thursday.
"The reception of the object of the contract was daily", "it could be daily, it could be every two days, it could be a whole week"; "the legal advice was to pick up the phone and call"; "if you went down to Arrecife and found a gap, you would go and ask him about this or that issue", he pointed out. With the latter, he was referring to the fact that they would consult him in his office in the Arrecife City Council, where Camero was then working as secretary. "Without hindering his professional work," Bartolomé Fuentes added.
Regarding Camero's incompatibility to provide services as an advisor to the Yaiza City Council, he stated that he was unaware of it, stressing that the Consistory was never "notified" of the file opened by the Public Service, which ended up removing him from his position in Arrecife, as all the local press published at the time.
In addition, he insisted on justifying the monthly money that Camero charged from Yaiza, stating that the lawyer even received him at his home when he had to "talk" about some "issue".
"It doesn't even enter my head or my way of being"
"It is impossible for me to agree with a person or a group of people from a certain date to carry out the looting of a City Council. Impossible. It doesn't even enter my head or my way of being. I deny it categorically," Bartolomé Fuentes defended this Thursday, who five years ago, in the Yate case, acknowledged not only crimes of urban planning prevarication, but also of embezzlement and document forgery.
In that case, he admitted in writing to having acted "with culpable and inexcusable negligence", by authorizing payments to Reyes for allowances and trips that had nothing to do with the exercise of his position as mayor. However, during this trial for payments to Camero, he has denied "categorically" that he could have acted for "any illicit purpose".
Regarding the dozens of payment acknowledgments he signed, without any file other than Camero's own invoice and the mayor's payment order, he admitted that there could have been errors. "I acknowledge that I can be wrong. I acknowledge that things may not have been done correctly," he admitted while those documents were being shown to him at the request of the prosecutor. However, he denied that there was any "connivance" for the "looting" of public funds.
"Was it paid twice?" he asked when he saw one of the documents. "The lack of approval from the mayor does not mean that the service has not been provided," he added when showing him another.
Justifies payments between 1996 and 2012 by a plenary agreement of 1980
Regarding the hiring of Camero, as the defenses have been doing since the beginning of the trial, he has attributed it to a plenary agreement of 1980, under the Mayoralty of Honorio García Bravo. In addition, he has also reiterated the argument that at that time there were three other external lawyers working for the Consistory.
Contrary to what two official experts declared on Wednesday, who spoke of illegal payments to Camero, without any hiring file, Bartolomé Fuentes has defended that this plenary agreement of 1980 -by which a payment of 50,000 pesetas per month was agreed for advisory work-, justified the services that continued to be directly awarded to him under the Mayoralty of Reyes, with payments of up to 46 million pesetas (276,000 euros) in a single month, both for advice and representation in alleged lawsuits.
"With the corresponding mistakes, I honestly believe that I did the work within my loyal knowledge and understanding", defended the former secretary, who began his statement stating that the training he received in his day "is not what they give now in schools", and that he also had to assume the position of auditor, for which he stressed that he had no specific studies. "I found a secretary with much more knowledge than me," he insisted when talking about what he "learned" from Camero, since he joined the City Council in 1981.
In addition, to justify the omissions of key documents in the payment files, he appealed to the fact that at that time there was no "mechanization", that the records and books "were manual" and that the procedure was "quite rudimentary".
"Did you fulfill your duty of supervision?" the prosecutor asked him. "I understand that yes, within my limitations", responded the former secretary, who still has other pending criminal cases, and in September will return to the dock for the Costa Roja license.
"I limited myself to doing what the holder did"
In this Thursday's session, another of the defendants, Antonio Fernández, who replaced Bartolomé Fuentes as accidental secretary-intervenor during his vacations, also testified. "I only have a school graduate," he began by underlining to questions from his lawyer, who is the only one he has agreed to answer.
As he himself detailed, in those periods in which he replaced the secretary, he signed a total of 11 payment orders to Camero. "I limited myself to doing what the holder did," he declared. And that was "checking that there was an invoice", issued by Fernández Camero, "and the payment orders signed by the mayor".
"Did you check that the services had been provided?" his lawyer asked him, to which he replied again that he looked at the invoice and the payment order. "Nobody told me I had to do anything else."
However, he then defended that he did know that the services had been provided, because he was aware that Camero advised the City Council and he himself made some inquiries.
In the case of Fernández, he is also accused of a certificate he signed years later, at the request of the then mayor, Gladys Acuña. "She asked me if I could reflect the different advice that Mr. Camero had given me, because she knew that I had been in the City Council for 30 years and could have more information than her."
That document, which was later sent to the Court that was investigating this case, was signed as accidental secretary, despite the fact that he was not holding that position at that time. "I understood that the mayor was appointing me as accidental secretary for that act. And the mayor also signed that document. I understood that with her signature she was ratifying the appointment," he defended.
