The treasurer of Arrecife says he was pressured to pay invoices without respecting the order.

The treasurer of the Arrecife City Council, Antonio Cabrera Panasco, one of the witnesses in the latest part of the Montecarlo case, admitted this Monday that he suffered pressure to approve the payment of some invoices without guaranteeing their precedence by order of seniority.

In the first session of the trial held in Lanzarote by the Las Palmas Court, Cabrera Panasco was initially asked about the procedures carried out in the City Council.

Then, the accusations in the case (the Prosecutor's Office, the Arrecife City Council itself, and the Urban Transparency organization) focused on knowing how the lists were drawn up with the invoices that were approved extraordinarily in the plenary sessions of November 2011 and December 2012.

One of the main facts that is being investigated in this piece is the payment of invoices from the company Tunera Producciones that presented irregularities, could not be paid through ordinary channels, and were included in a list to be paid in the municipal plenary session thanks to the request for a specific credit.

The treasurer has stated that a list of invoices was sent to him from the Department of Finance, but that no one certified that these were all the outstanding invoices, because he had to pay the oldest ones first.

A meeting took place in the Secretariat, prior to the plenary session, with the then mayor, the accused José Montelongo (PSOE), in which it was stated that there was urgency for the plenary agreement and, however, the treasurer did not report favorably because he had no record of that seniority.

Asked if he received pressure, he replied yes, "normal at that time."

In the end, the lists were taken to extrajudicial recognition in the plenary session against his criteria. "They never gave me that justification," he declared.

This witness explained that there was no fund disposition plan and there were liquidity problems, so he began to ask for a justification with the reason why a specific invoice had to be paid.

Between 2009 and 2012, an invoice registry operated in the Intervention department, to which a stamp was affixed without going through the general registry of the City Council. For the treasurer, this registry "did not have much formality," since it consisted "of just a stamp and that's it."

In the preliminary issues to the trial, the defenses requested the annulment or dismissal of the case for various reasons.

The lawyer for the businessman Eduardo Ferrer, owner of Tunera Producciones, argued that a "prospective investigation" has been carried out against his client, who has no relation to the initial complaint.

In the case of other defendants, who were already tried and acquitted in the previous piece related to the company Inelcon, they request the dismissal with the argument that the facts have already been judged, since the lists of invoices that were approved in the extraordinary plenary sessions are the same as in the previous piece.