Ignacio Castillo was in charge of collecting a large part of the cash that came in the Tenerife Fairground and to make the accounting entries in this regard. Said institution, dependent on the CouncilHe had this procedure of action, without any other technical or political position supervising his actions in the administration of economic resources or his work as head of Accounting. The magistrate José Luis González, of Section VI of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, sentenced Castillo to five years and one day in prison, to the absolute disqualification from exercise public functions for another eleven years, as well as to compensate the aforementioned public entity with 145,300 euros and to the payment of the procedural costs. González attributes to him a continuous crime of documentary falsification in a media contest with another continuous criminal offense of embezzlement of public funds.
The trial against the former head of fairground accounting It took place last September and the Jury Court found him guilty of the acts of which he was accused, as disclosed at the time. Ignacio Castillo worked with an employment contract and uninterruptedly for the Tenerife Fair Institution from 1989 until his retirement, on June 17, 2016. Until 2005 he had administrative functions and, over the next eleven years, he was in charge of « direct, coordinate, supervise, control and execute the tasks of accounting for notes, as well as the presentation of the company’s accounts, reports and audits ”. And, as already explained, it also received and accounted for all the cash that entered the public company without anyone controlling that work. An example of the amounts it handled were the tickets to the different fairs held at the fairgrounds.
Castillo was in charge of receiving the cash income and making the accounting entries
The magistrate affirms in the sentence that the accused, “in the exercise of his public functions and abusing his position as head of the Administration and Accounting Service, seized 11,222 euros.” A court of First Instance had sentenced him in September 2007 to pay a monthly pension to his ex-wife of 510 euros as a result of a Family trial. And the aforementioned judicial body communicated the resolution to the Tenerife Fair Institution to deduct such amount from Castillo’s payroll. However, the convicted today took advantage of his position of responsibility to make 15 direct transfers of 510 euros each from the account of the public company of the Cabildo to the account designated by the Court. Such events occurred between October 2007 and December of the following year. Of that figure, he later returned nine transfers to the fair institution, for which he owed the public entity 3,062 euros.
And, to hide that debt, according to the magistrate, he made a fictitious accounting entry in the cash journal of December 31, 2008. The annotation contemplated that the 3,062 euros would be returned by check in April 2009, but that document did not exist , so he never returned such an amount. And, in December 2009, the same Court of First Instance again required the Tenerife Fair Institution to deduct another 510 euros per month from Ignacio Castillo’s payroll to pay a debt with his ex-wife that amounted to 9,000 euros. But again, Castillo, instead of deducting the aforementioned amount per month from his salary, made direct transfers between the account of the Tenerife Fairgrounds to the account set by the Court. In total there were 16 transfers between January 5, 2010 and December 20, 2011. The defendant made two new fictitious entries in the accounts of the public company. One of them was for 6,120 euros and then he issued a receipt in which he, as head of Administration and Accounting, received from himself a check from Caja Madrid for the aforementioned value. However, there is also no evidence that such check was delivered or that the amount had been paid. The second entry to cover the aforementioned debt was 2,040 euros and was recorded on December 20, 2011. But there is no evidence that he had paid that figure.
Vouchers
The magistrate also considers that Castillo, “guided by the intention of obtaining an unjust enrichment, in the time period between September 22, 1998 and June 26, 2015”, He took advantage of the charges he held to seize «9,219.71 euros from his box, leaving a note of it in the form of 73 vouchers or annotations that they referred to the outflow of money for his personal use, the amounts of which he never justified, nor does it appear that he re-entered them into the Institution, nor that he gave part of them to the Directorate “, nor to the agency in charge of payroll to deduct such your salary figures.
Personal taxes and a nonexistent Treasury account
In the sentence released yesterday by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) it is stated that the defendant also took advantage of his position as Head of Accounting to instruct an administrator of the Tenerife Fair Institution to pay in the Santa Cruz City Council with cash from the aforementioned public entity, and by preparing a voucher, the taxes on the mechanical traction of a quad bike and a car that you own, as well as the property tax on your home and garage. , for a total of 354 euros, without it being established that the aforementioned figure was returned. The magistrate José Luis González states in the judicial resolution that Ignacio Castillo, thanks to the position he held and with the aim of obtaining an unfair benefit, between September 22, 2005 and June 17, 2016, appropriated 124,508 euros in cash from the cash of the institution dependent on the Cabildo de Tenerife. And, to hide his departure, he made a new accounting entry in an account that, although it pretended to be Treasury, was not then included in any accounting standard. Of this total amount, it recorded 118,420 euros for promissory notes pending collection and another 6,088 euros corresponding to a fortnight of unjustified vouchers. But none of these amounts corresponded to reality, according to the judicial authority. The embezzlement was denounced by Ignacio Pintado Mascareño, who in 2016 was manager of the Tenerife Fair Institution, now deceased. During the trial, Castillo blamed Pintado for not collecting promissory notes worth 124,000 euros on time.