The Teguise City Council Plenary has agreed to judicially claim more than two million euros for a banking operation signed in 2006 between the Teguise City Council and the BBVA entity, which contained "swap clauses of abusive interest rate." This claim to settle this debt will be carried out "with the mandatory reports of the Canary Islands Advisory Council and with the agreement of the municipal technical and legal team," as highlighted by the Consistory.
The mayor, Oswaldo Betancort, has reiterated the objective of the Government group "to clean up the municipal coffers and be able to announce next year that the Teguise City Council, and therefore all its taxpayers, do not owe a euro to the banks." In this sense, Betancort recalls that "in these nine years of government, the staggering amount of 21 million euros has been liquidated, and this operation with BBVA was part of a historically contracted debt that included the signing of an abusive clause, which was renegotiated in 2010 and then a reduction in interest rates was fought for in 2015, which meant a saving of 1 million euros, and whose remaining amount we hope to finalize during the first quarter of 2021."
The head of Economy and Finance, Miguel Ángel Jiménez, has pointed out that "during these years in charge of the Teguise accounts, an important change of course has been made for the financial health of the institution, in which we have redirected many of these contracts of dubious legality and that represented an unsustainable financial burden for the public administration." "This government has been characterized by scrutinizing what was initially contracted to finance certain projects but ended up being a legacy with high interest rates for the City Council and its inhabitants," says Jiménez.
For their part, the opposition questioned in the Plenary why this measure had not been adopted before, as other municipalities on the island have been doing in recent years to annul "toxic" financial operations carried out by previous governments.
