Prosecutor Leyre Chápuli Llorente has requested that preliminary proceedings be opened in the Courts to investigate the events reported last July to the Prosecutor's Office by the former AC councilor in Arrecife, Domingo García. In that complaint, the former councilor accused the former mayor, Manuel Fajardo Feo, and the lawyer Agustín Domingo Acosta of alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement.
On January 7, just before the ordinary deadline stipulated to analyze that complaint expired, the prosecutor signed a decree requesting that the complaint be sent to the Dean's Court of Arrecife, so that a case can be opened to investigate these events. The resolution has just been notified to the complainant and now the case will be distributed in the Courts, so that an Investigating Court is assigned to it.
Once the judge who must hear the case is established, the prosecutor requests that the two people named in Domingo García's complaint be called to testify as defendants, that is, the former mayor and the lawyer. In addition, he requests that a report be commissioned from the General Intervention of the Government of the Canary Islands to determine the "relevance of the contractual modality used", the "legality of the appointments made" and the "accounting adequacy of the items". That is, to clarify whether or not there was any type of irregularity in those contracts.
Six years and three government groups
The prosecutor refers in her writing to the lawsuits entrusted to this lawyer between 2010 and 2015, which is the period that Domingo García denounced. However, during that time there were up to three different government groups in the capital (the first PP-PIL-PNL, which was the one that reached the end of the 2007-2011 legislature; then the PP-PSOE, which began the last legislature; and finally the CC-PSOE, which governed after the motion of censure presented to Cándido Reguera, first with the support also of AC and then in minority until the end of the mandate).
In the case of Manuel Fajardo Feo, who is the only politician pointed out by Domingo García and the prosecutor, he did not become mayor of Arrecife until March 2012, so in reality most of the contracts were not made under his mandate. In fact, from 2012, most of the work carried out by this lawyer for the City Council responds to the continuation of litigation that was already open, such as the response to appeals filed by the opposing party, after the City Council won the lawsuits in the first instance with this same lawyer.
Along with Agustín Domingo Acosta, the City Council hired another twenty lawyers in that period, each one to handle matters related to their specialty. In the case of Acosta, who has been hired by the different mayors who have passed through the Corporation in recent years, the lawsuits had to do with urban planning issues and, in particular, with claims for millionaire sums to the City Council by landowners. Most of those lawsuits have already culminated, giving the City Council the reason and freeing it from paying more than 250 million euros.
Pending the Intervention report
As a result of the complaint filed by Domingo García, the prosecutor considers that the events "could be constitutive" of a crime of prevarication and another of embezzlement of public funds, although on this last one she does not specify, at least in the decree requesting that judicial proceedings be opened, the data that lead her to this conclusion. Regarding the alleged prevarication, she points out that Manuel Fajardo Feo made the contracts to this lawyer "with knowledge" of the Public Sector Contracts Law and "knowing its injustice". That is, failing to comply with some alleged procedure, although in that writing she does not specify which one either.
Now, once the case is assigned to a Court and proceedings are opened, it will be the Intervention of the Government of the Canary Islands who reports on the procedure followed to carry out those contracts, as requested by the Prosecutor's Office. In her writing, the prosecutor requests that this body be sent a copy of the City Council's budget item destined for "legal" and "contentious" expenses, as well as "the proposals for the appointment of this lawyer, the budgets, the Mayoral decrees with their appointments, the legal and necessity reports and the invoices corresponding to the services provided". That documentation was already requested by the Prosecutor's Office to the City Council and now, if this diligence is admitted, it will be analyzed by the General Intervention.
In his complaint, Domingo García went so far as to speak of "indetermination in the price" invoiced by the lawyer and of the "unnecessity of the assignments". However, the prosecutor does not make references to this in her writing. In fact, the budgets presented before the contracting have been provided and as for the alleged "unnecessity of the assignment", in all cases they responded to disputes in which the City Council needed to have a lawyer, for which it always resorts to external professionals, as it does not have its own lawyers to intervene in lawsuits.
Before going to the Prosecutor's Office, García had already publicly questioned the hiring of this lawyer, criticizing that the service was not put out to tender. In this regard, the City Council responded at the time that for procedures that are especially delicate, in which the institution is risking millions of euros, what they do is resort to "professionals of proven solvency". In addition, they appealed to the results obtained, given that those lawsuits were won, thus avoiding million-dollar disbursements in compensation. In any case, from the government group they stressed that the contracts with this and other lawyers did not exceed the amount that requires a tender to be called.
