The audit, economist and tax advisor Violeta Yanes assured that “I don’t know if he took the money, but the accounting hole was more than 124,000 euros” in the accounts of Tenerife Fairground, company dependent public of the Cabildo. This professional was hired to make an appraisal of the accounts of said mercantile company and was considerably surprised that in a Treasury account, “578”, there were numerous promissory notes that had not been collected for 14 or 16 years before, which they added a significant amount of money, the already mentioned 124,000 euros. When I ask By this situation to the now accused of embezzlement of public funds and documentary falsification, Ignacio Castillo, his answer did not seem entirely clear to him. According YanesHe replied that they were very old promissory notes, that he did not know, that they should be in another accounting account and that he was going to look at it.
This was stated in the second session of the trial with jury court which is followed in Section VI of the Provincial Court for embezzlement in the public company Recinto Ferial de Tenerife, where The former head of Administration and Accounting appears as investigated.
Given the circumstance that she had detected, Violeta Yanes went to the office of the then company manager of the island corporation, Ignacio Pintado Mascareño, and the person in charge of Human Resources, where she informed them that there were large amounts of money in uncollected promissory notes. . “They both looked at each other,” explained the auditor, and they asked her again to explain them to them. Yanes pointed out that there had been promissory notes pending collection for more than twelve years.
But this person in charge of reviewing the accounting procedures was also struck by what, according to her, happened later. Presumably, Yanes indicated, the now defendant transferred in an accounting entry the promissory notes that he had not collected since 2001 or 2003 to the cash section of the public company, that is, the money that is regularly available for emergency expenses or the change in the lockers. For that reason, that section gave a lump sum of 128,000 euros.
But faced with this reality, Violeta Yanes decided to carry out a cash count to find out exactly how much cash the company had in its facilities. And the result was that there were 4,000 euros.
The aforementioned auditor, as well as the two employees of the Administration and Accounting, Estrella and José, they never understood why Ignacio Castillo decided to take into account “578” the promissory notes accumulated for more than 12 years, since, according to the General Accounting Plan, the appropriate account for this was “431”. Yanes was also concerned, since “if he had not fixed it for a decade, how was he going to fix it in 15 days?”, Since that was the time that remained for Ignacio Castillo to retire. According to Yanes, on the days when he worked on the aforementioned audit, it was very difficult for him to get Ignacio Castillo to deliver the documentation he requested.
In yesterday’s session, Ignacio Domínguez, who is currently the current manager of the Fairgrounds, also gave a testimony as a witness, and who today also personally directs the Administration and Accounting areas. At the time when the events under trial occurred, Domínguez held various positions at the Fairgrounds. He affirmed that Castillo acted in his area with “almost full autonomy”, since the former manager Pintado Mascareño “did not like the Accounting subject.”
In the words of Domínguez, when the moment of his retirement arrived, the defendant today even asked the then manager if he could continue to collaborate from home, through remote computer connections; something that Pintado Mascareño opposed. According to the current manager, this situation would have been “a tremendous anomaly.”
Faced with what was expressed in the first session of the trial by the investigated, the aforementioned witness commented that Ignacio Castillo signed a document in which he waived part of the retirement bonus (about 6,000 euros approximately) to compensate for some accounting irregularities that the Today the accused allegedly had committed, as “lack of documents to justify” some anomalies detected.
Three months after the retirement of the investigated, Ignacio Pintado Mascareño, now deceased, filed the complaint for embezzlement in the accounts of the island entity. The Board of Directors of Recinto Ferial dismissed said manager, supposedly due to “loss of confidence”, the current holder of that position clarified yesterday.
Domínguez affirmed that in the following months he had the opportunity to speak several times with Pintado Mascareño and found him “emotionally devastated”, since he was still not clear about how the situation of imbalance in the accounts had come to be. But in the last years in which he served as a manager, between 2013 and 2016, Pintado did begin to have doubts about “handling cash.” And it is that at that time the embezzlement that affected another island society, Sinpromi, arose.
Specifically, Ignacio Pintado was concerned about the control protocols for the amounts of cash that were entered were sufficient and if there was any way to reduce these movements of bills and coins.
In Domínguez’s opinion, the deceased former manager never informed him that there were old promissory notes and that the amount of these defaults put the company at risk of dissolution. public company Recinto Ferial de Tenerife. For the current manager, the logical thing in these cases is that, in the year in which the promissory note matures, said document is written off. And, that way, there is no risk of accumulating excessive debt. To Domínguez it also seemed “a real nonsense” to accumulate all the aforementioned promissory notes in the account “578”.
