The manager of Canal Gestión, Gerardo Díaz, admitted this Thursday before the judge that the lawyer Ignacio Calatayud, advisor to Pedro San Ginés "had a contract with Canal Gestión" from "two or three months after the company was created until a few months ago, May 2015" and that "when the seizure was carried out, Ignacio Calatayud was one of the several lawyers" of the company. He has confirmed that the lawyer who advised the Consortium and the Island Water Council in the seizure of the Montaña Roja plant was in turn a lawyer of the company. It should be remembered that Canal Gestión was the company to which the plant was handed over and that it has been operating it since the seizure took place in September of last year.
To carry out this precautionary measure, as San Ginés himself acknowledged before the judge, there were no written legal reports to support the decision before it was adopted. The only report on record was prepared after the seizure was executed and is signed by the lawyer Ignacio Calatayud.
Díaz has gone to the Arrecife Courts to testify as a witness in the case investigating this seizure, in which the president of the Cabildo and the Island Water Council, Pedro San Ginés, and the then managers of the Council and the Island Water Consortium, José Juan Hernández Duchemín and Domingo Pérez Callero, are charged.
"Verbal" and written advice 'a posteriori'
In that only report on record regarding the seizure, dated 11 days after the measure was executed, Calatayud, who is not a Cabildo official, began by explaining that San Ginés requested the report from him after the seizure had taken place. The president asked him, among other things, if "the subrogation or seizure of the service by the Council was viable and, likewise, the necessary requirements for it", even though the plant was already seized.
In his response, Calatayud endorsed San Ginés' decision and, in addition, put on record that he had previously verbally advised the president on this matter. "Prior to the seizure, this lawyer was consulted, who considered that said measure was legally viable", he literally says in his report, which was also assumed by the secretary of the Cabildo, the Council and the Island Water Consortium, Pancho Perdomo.
