The former mayor of Arrecife, María Isabel Déniz, is already facing a request for 22 years in prison and 28 years of disqualification in the Unión case that investigates her time in front of the Council. That is the penalty requested for her by the popular accusation, represented by Urban Transparency, which has just presented its qualification brief in this case, focused on the awarding of contracts to Urbaser and the construction of the Argana sports hall by FCC, with which "the systematic and continuous looting of public coffers was carried out."
In the absence of the Prosecutor's Office brief, which will be carried out by anti-corruption prosecutor Luis del Río, for the moment the popular accusation has directed accusation against 19 people, including politicians, technicians and businessmen, within the last phase of Unión, which became known as "Operation Jable." In its writing, Urban Transparency demands the same penalty of 22 years in prison for the former head of the Technical Office of Arrecife, Rafael Arrocha. In addition, it asks that both he and Déniz be sentenced to pay a fine equivalent to triple the value of the "gifts" they received. The third highest penalty is requested for the former secretary of the City Council, Felipe Fernández Camero, for whom they are asking for 19 years in prison and 20 years of disqualification.
According to the popular accusation, all of them "dedicated themselves to enriching themselves illicitly with such a desire for luxury, power and money that it did not end until the citizens removed them from the City Council in the 2007 elections," in the case of María Isabel Déniz, and until the outbreak of the Unión case in the rest, when in 2009 "the UCO intervened in the Arrecife City Council by order of the head of Court Number 5 of Arrecife, César Romero Pamparacuatro." "For years, Lanzarote society was a silent witness to this story of indecency and fear, of ostentation and baseness," says the private prosecution, which considers "the history of the Arrecife City Council is the history of criminal urban planning and corruption taken to the point of nausea."
"A truly obscene spectacle of political pornography"
Throughout the qualification brief, the prosecution makes constant references to the annotations that the former manager of Urbaser in Lanzarote, Jacinto Álvarez, made for years in several notebooks that provided key data to this investigation, detailing various bribes paid to public officials and civil servants in the form of luxury gifts, trips and cash amounts, in exchange for allegedly fraudulent awards and payments of inflated invoices or for services not provided.
"The annotations of Jacinto Álvarez and the transcription of the conversations show a truly obscene spectacle of political pornography," concludes Urban Transparency, which is asking for another of the highest penalties, 16 years in prison, precisely for Jacinto Álvarez. Along with him, four Urbaser executives face the same prison request: Santiago Alonso Herreros, Manuel Andrés Martínez, Francisco José Martínez Llerandi and Stephan Jean Antoine Balverde. In addition, for both them and the rest of the defendants, dozens of years of disqualification are also claimed.
Eight years for Dimas, Curbelo and Leal
For his part, the historical leader of the PIL, Dimas Martín; his right-hand man, Matías Curbelo; and the former councilor of the Cabildo and former secretary of the PSOE in Arrecife, Miguel Ángel Leal, face a request for 8 years in prison and as many years of disqualification for their alleged intervention in the rigging of the award of the garbage collection contract in 2002 to Tecmed (which was later absorbed by Urbaser) and in the collection of bribes in exchange for that award.
After his arrest in this case, Matías Curbelo himself confessed that Dimas Martín and Isabel Déniz "split" an illegal commission and assured that he personally collected one of the "envelopes", with "between 10 and 12 million pesetas." According to Curbelo, he then gave that envelope to Miguel Ángel Leal, who is the husband of the then deputy mayor of Arrecife, when PIL and PSOE governed together in the capital under the Mayoralty of María Isabel Déniz.
Arrocha and Spínola, "afternoon projects" and "daytime authorizations"
As for the rest of the defendants, another of the highest penalties, specifically 10 years in prison, is requested for a technician from the Cabildo, Manuel Jesús Isidro Spínola, who shared private companies with the head of the Technical Office of Arrecife, Rafael Arrocha, dedicating himself to carrying out architecture and engineering projects. "Those same projects that provided them with huge benefits in the afternoon, were the ones that Mr. Spínola and Mr. Arrocha authorized in their morning hours in the Cabildo and in the Arrecife City Council respectively," argues the popular accusation, which emphasizes that both "acted in the private sector with express incompatibility of their position."
In addition, he adds that for this they "used" two other partners, Daniel Hernández Caraballo and Rafael Antonio Corujo Gil, "to represent the entities and present projects or works never executed and unnecessary, and thus profit from false invoices for works not carried out satisfactorily that Rafael Arrocha validated, as head of the Technical Office, and were paid by the Arrecife City Council." For these two defendants and for a third, Julio Romero, the prosecution asks for 12 months of fine and 3 years of disqualification. As for Manuel Jesús Isidro Spínola, in addition to 10 years in prison, the popular accusation requests that he be imposed a fine for triple the value of the "gifts" he allegedly received.
A "corruption network" behind the Argana pavilion
Finally, the accusation brief of Urban Transparency is also directed against two executives of Fomento Construcciones y Contratas, Enrique Astorga and Enrique Hernández, for whom it asks for 6 years in prison and 12 years of disqualification for employment or public office. According to the popular accusation, the "modus operandi" in this case was identical to that applied with Urbaser. That is, "Mr. Arrocha reports favorably, Mr. Fernández Camero endorses it legally and the mayor takes it to municipal approval, aware of the corruption network behind it, with the aim of continuing to fatten his personal fortune illicitly."
Among other things, the UCO investigation detected that FCC paid for a trip to Morocco for María Isabel Déniz and several members of her family, coinciding with the awarding of that contract. The accusation points out that this pavilion was awarded to this company "bordering on reckless bidding", to then multiply the budget of the work with modifications of the project that were approved even 3 years after the deadline in which the work should have been completed. And the result was "a sports hall that did not meet the minimum conditions to obtain the opening to the public for security reasons, obsolete before it was born", and that "once the plot that orchestrated its construction was known, it was closed to the public and has not been opened yet."
In fact, Urban Transparency recalls that in order to open it, the City Council has calculated that it is necessary to carry out works worth more than 1.5 million euros, given the "accumulation of deficiencies" detected. However, at the time, "the defendants returned the corresponding guarantees" to FCC, "after submitting the certifications to the City Council", approving the work, which "should never have been inaugurated or opened to the public", and which was closed after the outbreak of Operation Unión.
Three criminal acts and almost a dozen crimes
In its qualification brief, the popular accusation distinguishes three different criminal acts: one focused on the awarding of the garbage collection contract in 2002, another for the extension of the parks and gardens and street cleaning contracts, also with Tecmed, which increased in a "disproportionate and unjustified" way, reaching up to 517 percent of the price for which it had been originally awarded, and the third for the construction of the Argana pavilion.
To achieve each of these criminal acts, the popular accusation maintains that those involved incurred, depending on the participation of each one, up to 8 different crimes: bribery, prevarication, alteration of competition, embezzlement of public funds, fraud against the administration, infidelity and violation of secrecy, negotiations prohibited to public officials and documentary falsification.
Thus, when requesting prison sentences, it focuses on each of the three plots, treating each of the crimes as "concurrent" crimes, that is, necessary to obtain the same end. This involves applying the penalty provided for the most punished crime in the Penal Code, increasing it by one degree, and multiplying it by three in the case of María Isabel Déniz and Rafael Arrocha. In the case of the rest, the penalties depend on whether they are related to the three allegedly criminal plots or not, and also on the alleged crimes in which they incurred in each one.
In addition, the accusation brief also includes the partners of María Isabel Déniz and Dimas Martín, Domingo Abreut Cabrera and Elena Martín, as participants for lucrative purposes. Their names were incorporated into the case a few months ago, since both the investigating judge, Silvia Muñoz, and the Public Prosecutor's Office, considered that both "benefited" from the illegal commissions that their partners allegedly received. Thus, although no penalties are requested for them, they would have to respond for the economic amounts, in case of conviction.