Councilors of the Canarian Socialist Party-PSOE, United We Can and Citizens appeared this Monday in the plenary hall of the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council to check how the secretary of the Corporation, Luis Prieto, breached the Law of Bases of Local Regime and it did not convene the extraordinary session requested on November 4 by all of them to address two issues of maximum current interest for the institution: the Sacyr case, for which the City Council claims about 30 million euros from the multinational, and the almost 400,000 euros That the local police escorts are costing the consistories this year, which the mayor of the city, José Manuel Bermúdez, of the Canary Coalition, and the expelled defector of Ciudadanos Evelyn Alonso enjoy based on debatable reports. The plenary session, of course, was not held.
The Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council adapts a contest to the convenience of the lawyer representing it in a lawsuit against Sacyr
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From the plenary hall, the PSOE spokesperson in the consistory, Patricia Hernández, who was mayor for a period of less than a year after the 2019 municipal elections, wrote a WhatsApp message to the general secretary of the plenary session, Luis Prieto, informing him that the councilors who requested the plenary session were there waiting for the constitution of the Corporation to initiate it. And that, upon meeting the minimum required by law, that is, a third of the councilors, the plenary session should be constituted and held. It was not like that because the secretary did not appear in the room.
Since on November 4, the opposition councilors, more than a quarter of what the Law on the Bases of Local Regime mandates, formally requested the holding of this plenary session, the obstacles have been constant. They began with the secretary, who after the deadline to convene the session, began to informally ask the conveners to correct formal defects, such as that the signatures be consigned differently from how they had been presented.
The claimants, upon seeing the municipal position, appealed to the Contentious-Administrative jurisdiction, and the court number 4 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife rejected their request for very precautionary measures by preferring precautionary measures that would be granted to the defendant, the City Council, to be heard in the procedure prior to the assessment of these extraordinary measures. In addition, the judge told the opposition groups that he should make routine checks, such as the number of councilors of the Corporation (to verify the minimum necessary for the full application) and if the applicants had no longer exhausted the three applications that mandated by law. The two conditioning factors operated in favor of the municipal opposition, which, however, was left without very precautions that would allow it to arm itself in front of the secretary and the governing board.
Thus, the opposition councilors only have the judge to enter the merits of the matter and agree with them, or for the municipal secretary to decide motu proprio to convene the plenary session to debate the two issues that the opposition is interested in. Although one of them, the one referred to the scandal of the Sacyr case (the irregular return to the multinational company of the fee that it paid to win the contract for the integral water cycle of the city) is his concern because he is among the people investigated.
