(1)
DOES A MAYOR HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO OVERRULE INTERVENTION OBJECTIONS?
YES. But NO does he have it to carry out "an arbitrary exercise of power, prohibited by article 9.3 of the Constitution", "issuing a resolution(s) that is not the effect of the Constitution and the rest of the legal system but, purely and simply, the product of his will, unreasonably converted into an apparent source of normativity", as the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife has stated. In other words: Clavijo's sense of impunity led him to believe that "my word is the law", more typical of a Mexican corrido than of a State of Law.
REMOVAL OF IMMUNITY.
These days, with the imminent entry into force of the Statute, the repeal of immunity and the consequent loss of jurisdiction of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, Clavijo and his acolytes are "outraged".
They have brought out the whole band of drums and bugles of the Regime: heralds of Las Teresitas, peninsular mercenaries (or Goths?) at the service of power as since the times of the Conquest, media knocked out financially and, therefore, connected to the artificial respirator of official subsidies?
And they shamelessly talk about immunity as if it were a right of Clavijo, when it is a prerogative of Parliament to protect the parliamentary function. The proof is that those with immunity cannot renounce the jurisdiction, simply because it is not a right.
And if immunity could still retain some meaning, both for deputies and members of the Government, it would never be with respect to misdeeds committed in the performance of other positions. Pretending to use the jurisdiction as a shield against the ordinary Jurisdiction in relation to events committed before being a deputy or president of the Government, aligns Clavijo with the worst of the political class. Alongside those characters whose perverse use of immunity has pushed broad sectors of Canarian citizens to demand and achieve its repeal.
THE CONSPIRACY NARRATIVE.
Now it turns out that the Prosecutor's Office, which delayed 7 months --and had to be required on two occasions by the Investigating Judge, to report on the advisability of raising the citation of Clavijo as an investigated party to the TSJC-- "has changed its criteria" showing itself in favor of Clavijo's indictment without anything new having happened in the investigation. Therefore, it would be the arrival of the PSOE to the state government, whose president would have nothing else to occupy himself with than the adventures of Clavijo the mayor, the only reason that would explain this sudden change of criteria of the Prosecutor's Office. So persecution we have. The same old song of the Las Teresitas case, like an eternal revival.
In reality, what has been surprising is that the Prosecutor's Office did not echo before, much earlier, the successive pronouncements of the Provincial Court (the first of them on October 17, 2017) pointing out the indications of prevarication, embezzlement of public funds and influence peddling evident in the Grúas Case that point to Clavijo as the main actor.
The truth is that it would not have occurred to me that the exasperating indolence of the Prosecutor's Office in this procedure or the absence of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office in the investigation of crimes that fall within its scope of action, obeyed to who knows what instructions from the previous state government or to hidden influences of the eternal government of Coalición Canaria. One is always in time to learn something, even if it is from the not recommended school of ATI.
Clavijo is the star protagonist of events of a criminal nature: the granting of the illegal loan and the even more illegal extension of a concession that should have been resolved by legal imperative, because he was the inspirer of both decisions and because he used the power of the mayor's office to skip the warnings repeatedly raised by the General Intervention, which is the body responsible for the prior control of legality of all the acts of the City Council that generate economic obligations for the municipal Treasury.
If Clavijo had not issued two Decrees lifting the "objections" of the Intervention, the Governing Board would not have been able to grant the loan, nor Antonio Pérez-Godiño approve the extension for four more years (and 3.2 million euros) of a concession whose expiration should have been declared by legal mandate.
Those illegal Decrees are the body of the crimes of prevarication (2) and those of embezzlement of funds (another 2). Because in the Grúas case everything is documented. And what is written, is written.
(And 2)
DISMANTLING NONSENSE.
It is convenient to dismantle, to finish, some nonsense that Clavijo said in Parliament. What is being investigated is not the decision to privatize the management of the municipal crane service, back in 2004 and 2005, but the shenanigans perpetrated by Clavijo several years later. Pressuring the first concessionaire of the Service, José Padilla, to hire as employees "no matter what" several friends of Clavijo Batlle himself. Economically suffocating the concessionaire company Auto Grúas Poli by delaying the payments of the City Council, to force its sale to those same workers, who blindly bought the concessionaire company (2011), mortgaging their own homes, confident in the protection of the already mayor Clavijo, who had suggested that it could be a "nice business".
When the company entered into a situation of insolvency, with more than 300,000 euros of debts with the workers, the Social Security and the state and regional Treasuries, also seriously breaching its contractual obligations with the City Council, Clavijo used all the power of the mayor's office to protect the interests of his friends: he "temporarily" intervened the Service; he decided outside the law to give the concessionaire company a loan in public money of 120,000 euros, to disguise the bankruptcy of the Company, which continued to accumulate debts up to 750,000 euros; and finally, he extended for 4 more years (which can reach up to 15, according to the contract that is still in force) a concession that --with the Law in hand-- had to be resolved, rescued the service and taken out again to public tender. All this skipping the warnings of illegality repeatedly formulated by the General Intervention of the City Council.
Because, let all those who read these lines know, the Company Auto Grúas Poli S.L. at the time of being intervened by the City Council (January 2014) did not have reliable accounting, nor was it in a position to continue providing the service and was in a situation of insolvency, which legally obliged it to convene a creditors' meeting and to initiate the procedure for its dissolution. All this was reported on April 8, 2014 by the officials commissioned to manage the Service once it was intervened by the City Council. Clavijo kept that report in a drawer and did the opposite of what the conclusions of the technical and legal report of the Service's interveners prescribed.
The other excuse of Clavijo --whose legal and journalistic spokesmen speak of these adventures as if they were reduced to the granting of a loan without a term and without adequate guarantee (hiding that it is the granting of the loan itself the main reason for illegality, as the Intervention reiterated)-- is that the loan was granted to pay the back wages that the "other" workers, that is, those not included in the payroll of Clavijo's friends or converted under his patronage into owners of the Company, had been claiming since May 2013. It is also false: the loan was granted by the Governing Board to pay "the salaries of the workers and current expenses" of the intervened Company. In fact, until recently they had not collected all the outstanding salaries.
And know also that of Clavijo's field assistants, the current mayor is charged both for his participation in the illegal loan, and for the role he played in the extension of the contract and the concession of the Crane Service. And Pérez-Godiño is exclusively for his participation in that illegal extension of the contract with Auto Grúas Poli, which according to Clavijo and his spokesmen has never existed.
And what allows to explain the repeated illegalities of Clavijo and his favoritism is his demonstrated friendship with the workers he plugged in and then turned into concessionaires of the crane service. And that is called influence peddling. Here and in China.
La Laguna, November 4, 2018.
Santiago Pérez García, councilor of La Laguna.