The mayor of Arrecife, Cándido Reguera, appeared this Friday to testify as an accused at the Court of Instruction 6 of Arrecife, within the framework of a process opened against the previous government group of San Bartolomé, in the last legislature, of which Reguera was a part between 2003 and July 2004.
The lawsuit was filed in November 2005 by the then councilor of Citizen Alternative in San Bartolomé, José Antonio González (today councilor of the PSOE). The events have to do with the demolition of an 18th century house and with an urban agreement signed with a company by which the City Council ceded two plots to a Compensation Board of which the brother of the then mayor, Miguel Martín, was the administrator.
There are 15 people accused in the process and all of them have been testifying in the five years since the complaint was filed. However, in the case of Reguera, his summons came later, since until December 2009 (when he resigned from his seat as a national deputy), he had the status of aforado.
Before his appearance before the Justice, Cándido Reguera defends his actions and affirms that all the reports on the agreement that was signed when he was a member of that government group were favorable, and that when a subsequent agreement on the same property was approved, he was no longer in the City Council.
Regarding the demolition of the building, Reguera assures that it was the PP who opened the file and sanctioned the demolition of the property, and that then they looked for a way to protect the house through an agreement. Furthermore, he affirms that at that time, the house was not well protected because the catalog had not been completed.
Seven years ago
The events refer to the partial demolition in March 2003 of an 18th century house included in the Catalog of Historical-Cultural Heritage of San Bartolomé. The then mayor Miguel Martín (CC) signed, with prior authorization from the Government Commission, when he was in office (June 2003) an agreement with the company Garpalanz by which the City Council excluded that house from the catalog, gave a license to segregate the property on which the house was located and bought that property from the company for 90,000 euros.
In addition, the City Council granted a license to build forty-one homes on the rest of the property and commissioned Garpalanz to build a playground, without putting the work out to tender, on the property recently acquired by the City Council. With this agreement, according to the complaint, a plenary agreement of 2002 was violated by which the house was included in the municipal catalog and the granting of licenses was suspended.
Farms in Playa Honda
Later, in March 2005, when Reguera was no longer in the City Council, another agreement was signed with the company Soegan, which inherited the rights of Garpalanz, which annulled the previous one, by which the City Council acquired the property of the 18th century house, whose demolition had been stopped. The company was obliged to rehabilitate the partially demolished house for 377,000 euros. In return, the City Council ceded two municipal properties in the industrial area of Playa Honda, valued by an external technician well below the market price, according to the complaint.
The two properties were located within Action Unit number 4 of Playa Honda and the administrator of the compensation board of that Unit was the brother of the mayor Miguel Martín, Cayetano Martín. The City Council had approved said Unit only two months before and had made a modification one month before the agreement.
In that agreement, in addition to the transfer of the properties to the company, the City Council promised to double the buildability of the plots and to modify the subsidiary planning regulations or, if that were not possible, to incorporate the agreed increase in buildability in the General Plan of the municipality, which was being drafted.
New plenary session
In October 2005, the members of the government group ratified the March agreement in plenary session, despite the legal warnings made by Alternativa Ciudadana, which decided to go to court and denounce the entire government group (in which Reguera was no longer), the managers of the companies Garpalanz and Soegan, the appraiser of the properties and the mayor's brother.
The complaint considers that the narrated facts could constitute several crimes of prevarication, embezzlement of public funds, a crime against land management and a crime against Historical Heritage.
ACN Press
