The former head of accounting at the Tenerife Fairgrounds, Ignacio C., has been sentenced by the sixth section of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Provincial Court to five years and one day in jail and to pay compensation of 145,304 euros to the Fair Institution after of having been found guilty of the continuing crime of document falsification and another continuing crime of embezzlement of public funds.
The former administrator of the Tenerife Fairgrounds was able to alter the accounts of the institution, according to experts
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In addition, he has been sentenced to a special disqualification penalty for passive suffrage for the duration of the sentence and another absolute disqualification penalty for the exercise of public functions for eleven years and one day. In addition, you must take charge of the legal costs.
According to the proven facts contained in the sentence, no one controlled the amounts of money that Ignacio C. received for the fair institution, and thus, between September 2005 and June 2016 he seized more than 11,000 euros from the public body belonging to the Cabildo de Tenerife. The order states that Ignacio C. had to pay more than 16,000 euros to his ex-wife by order of a court and that, instead of making the monthly transfers from his own payroll, he used an account at the Fairgrounds to periodically pay the amount of 510 euros to satisfy the debt. In this way, he paid the court more than 7,500 euros with money that actually belonged to the public body belonging to the Cabildo de Tenerife.
After a while, he made up to nine transfers from his own account to that of the Fairgrounds, with which he returned some 4,500 euros. But there were about 3,200 missing in the cash register and to hide this accounting gap, “in a mendacious way”, according to the sentence, he made a fictitious entry in the accounting simulating a payment with a check under the concept of “castles”. But that check never existed, so he simulated that cash outflow to make up for the money that was missing because he had taken it.
Already in 2009, a court again required Ignacio C. to enter the amount of 9,000 euros in payment to his ex-wife, and for this, the now convicted man again used the same modus operandi, that is, to make up to 16 income of 510 euros not from his payroll, but from an account with public money at the Fairgrounds. Thus he came to pay up to 8,100 euros to the court.
To cover up this outflow of money and balance the accounts, he reinvented two accounting entries, again under the concept of “castles”.
Apart from these transfers, Ignacio C. seized, according to the sentence, another 9,200 euros for his “personal enrichment”, and to hide it he created different vouchers that never justified the absence of money.
In addition, he paid various taxes on his own vehicles and the IBI of his domicile also with money from the Fairgrounds.
In 2016, shortly before retiring, he seized another 124,000 euros, which he diverted to an account that he pretended to belong to the institution, although it was a personal account. To hide that hole in the accounting, he invented payments and vouchers and made transfers to hide the true amount of existing funds.
