The Sixth Section of the Provincial Court has declared final the sentence of the Montecarlo case by which the former mayor of Arrecife, José Montelongo, and eight other people were acquitted and the former auditor, Carlos Sáenz, and the councilor Isabel Martinón, were convicted. This was dictated in an order signed this Monday, December 19.
In addition to José Montelongo, Carlos Lemes, Eduardo Lasso, Víctor Sanginés, Alberto Morales, José Nieves Caraballo, Miguel Ángel Leal, Penélope Tabares and Isidro Hernández were acquitted. In the same resolution, the Chamber agrees that "the files be passed to the Public Prosecutor's Office so that it may issue a report on the advisability of definitively archiving the proceedings with respect to the aforementioned defendants, and once the report has been issued in this regard, the proceedings should be definitively archived, leaving the appropriate notes in the registry books of this Court", the order states.
As for Sáenz and Martinón, the sentence considered the administrative prevarication proven, but not the rest of the crimes for which the Public Prosecutor's Office had filed charges. For Sáenz, who already has other convictions behind him, the penalty established this time by the Court was four years and three months of disqualification, applying as a "very qualified mitigating factor the collaboration with justice" and the "undue delays" in the processing of the case. For her part, Martinón was sentenced to 7 years of disqualification. Currently, neither of them holds public office.