Gone are the days of interviews in local and regional media where Don Felipe pontificated on the legality of all the illegalities that were committed in Lanzarote. Gone are the years when telling the truth about Don Felipe meant the kidnapping of a publication (as happened to Cuadernos del Sureste and its 2003 article: "The Secretary: the fifth power"). Even further away is his career as secretary, broken by a manifest and embarrassing incompatibility, defending private clients while acting as secretary. Gone today is that feeling of maximum impunity with which Don Felipe moved on the island for more than 4 decades.
But the truth is that the social cost being paid for a character who has already gone down in Lanzarote's saddest history is high, even to this day. Yes, it is true, Don Felipe is convicted of the crimes of: "fraud, bribery, disclosure of secrets and infidelity in the custody of documents." In plain language, for almost all the corruption crimes that can be applied to a municipal secretary.
Now, when everything seems so far away, it is even more difficult to understand how a man of these "qualities" had so much power and responsibility in his possession. And how he was hired to defend, in his role as a lawyer, our public institutions, with disastrous results for them.
Although it is true that this Third Secretary, upon his arrival on our island in the 80s, confused society, the passage of decades made it increasingly evident what this man was dedicated to.
How was it possible that while Don Felipe was being investigated and charged with the crimes for which he is now being convicted, he was hired by the Popular Party as the defense lawyer for the Arrecife City Council in the case of the Ginory plot and the Islote del Francés. Two resounding defeats for which we, the people of Arrecife, are still paying the consequences today. Especially when he had already been expelled from the municipal secretariat due to incompatibility.
Felipe Fernández Camero lost the Ginory lawsuit. A plot that never existed and that will cost the municipality of Arrecife more than 40 million euros in an amazing compensation. How is it possible that a man who betrayed himself in the exercise of his functions as secretary was the one who should defend the rights of the municipality he so diligently plundered?
Now it seems even more amazing to us that for losing this procedure he had a minor contract of 18 thousand euros and ended up charging almost 300 thousand. A separate case deserves the role of the prosecutor's office in Lanzarote, which, when the strange procedure was brought to its attention, sadly looked the other way.
Don Felipe, his figure, his attacks on the PIOL, his cynical interviews, the cases of corruption in which, in one way or another, he is always present on the island, deserve a detailed study. Because if Manrique represented the dream of the people of Lanzarote, Felipe is the living image of the nightmare of an island that could not control its territory and its future, due to a person who today carries a sentence that surprises almost no one.
Cristina Duque Ramírez. Councilor of the PSOE in the Arrecife City Council
