The Supreme Court has ratified the sentence that acquitted the former Urbaser delegate in Lanzarote, Jacinto Álvarez, and seven other people, thus overturning the company's strategy, which intended to maintain that it was unaware of everything that was happening in Arrecife. Urbaser filed that lawsuit after several of its managers in Madrid were arrested within Operation Jable of the Unión case, which is still awaiting trial.
"If I am convicted before that trial, they will discredit me," said Jacinto Álvarez during the hearing, who was also arrested in Jable and confessed to the crimes, implicating his superiors in the payment of bribes to politicians and technicians, such as the then mayor, María Isabel Déniz, and the former secretary of Arrecife, Felipe Fernández Camero.
In the first instance ruling, the Second Section of the Provincial Court concluded that "what was happening in the Urbaser delegation in Lanzarote was perfectly known and consented to by Jacinto Álvarez's superiors," as also maintained by the Public Prosecutor's Office, which did not file charges in that case, driven only by Urbaser as a private prosecutor.
"The plaintiff was not unaware of the facts that constitute the object of the lawsuit, and it may even turn out that they contributed to its commission," that ruling warned, which has now been fully ratified.
In fact, the Supreme Court also recalls that this Urbaser lawsuit was filed after Operation Jable, which investigated "conducts in which, eventually, other company officials, superior to Jacinto in the hierarchical chain, may have had some kind of participation."
Therefore, it considers the Court's criterion of maintaining "a reasonable principle of distrust" and "exercising extreme caution regarding the assessment of what they declared in this trial," or by their subordinates, appropriate, given the possibility that they were trying to "transfer eventual responsibilities of their own to third parties."
The only "scapegoat" among the workers
The new ruling, dated April 21, also shares the "strangeness" expressed by the Court, given the fact that workers who acknowledged in this trial their participation in the "clearly irregular" events, continued working for the plaintiff company, which despite that did not fire them.
"With a striking exception that the challenged ruling takes care to highlight, that of Ángel Ramón de León Martín, who, graphically, referred to himself as the only scapegoat," the Supreme Court emphasizes.
"Said witness argued that they fired him because he did not declare to the company officials what they wanted, that the purpose of those was to "sink Jacinto", but that he could not explain anything to them because the UCO had asked him not to. The witness added that, in his opinion, if they let all that happen it is because it was also known from above," the ruling adds.
"Urbaser workers provided services in politicians' properties"
During the trial, Urbaser tried to prove that Álvarez had appropriated almost 400,000 euros from the company, with the collaboration of his wife, his two children, and the other four defendants (one of them an Urbaser worker and the other three from one of the supplier companies). Among other things, the lawsuit argued that the former delegate had charged the company for invoices for various supplies, including construction material and plants, which never actually arrived at the Urbaser warehouses. And also that he had assigned company workers, during their working hours, to carry out work in his private home.
However, the ruling points out that there are "serious doubts" about the "ignorance" that Urbaser really had of both those material purchases and the works that "were carried out not only in Jacinto's homes, but also in those of third parties." In fact, it considers it proven that "workers from the Urbaser delegation in Lanzarote provided repair and construction services in properties owned by various politicians on the island, to whom certain gifts were also given during the Christmas season, without it being demonstrated that Urbaser's managers were unaware of such actions."
In this regard, it recalls the testimony given by a company worker as a witness, who acknowledged in the trial that "he had done work in other homes, such as that of Mr. Arrocha, an engineer from the Arrecife City Council," and that they had also been in the home of the then mayor, María Isabel Déniz, accused in Jable of having rigged the awarding of the contract and of having later allowed Urbaser to inflate the invoices it charged to the City Council, in exchange for cash and various gifts, such as trips and luxury products.