The Prosecutor’s Office has transferred a request to order the declaration as defendants of ten members of the Board of Directors of the Science and Technology Park company, including two former presidents of the Cabildo, for an alleged misuse of public money in a space of our municipality , such as the fields of the Ciudad Deportiva located in Geneto.
As the journalist David Cuesta has extensively developed in several articles, the Prosecutor’s Office sees “strong indications” of prevarication and embezzlement in the so-called Geneto case, which is based on the purchase of land from Club Deportivo Tenerife by a public company of the Cabildo Insular , which paid 20 million euros to acquire two Geneto plots, an amount that would exceed the cadastral value of the land by 524% according to existing technical reports.
This procedure is reminiscent of others such as that of Las Teresitas, since it includes a whole debate on a land that by now should be public and where part of the money ends up in important businessmen, similar in some name to the previous case.
The Geneto case also has its own path at the lagoon level. CD Tenerife chose this area, specifically the space known as El Cubanito, for the development of a brand new Sports City on 106,995.50 m2 of old farmland, on a plot that according to the current PGO was intended for sports uses, on land consolidated urban.
On March 19, 1999, the former president of the blue and white entity, Javier Pérez, registered a proposal in the Cabildo requesting 350,000,000 pesetas, some 2,103,542.37 euros, to collaborate with the start-up of the Sports City, an agreement that is formalized at the end of that same year. The arguments for taking this step were based on the fact that this infrastructure would have “a marked and important impact on the youth of the province of Tenerife” and would also be for the “benefit of promoting grassroots sports in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, with the consequent public interest of the same”.
On October 16, 2001, the contract for the works covered by the Cabildo was developed, which were budgeted at 402,684,163 pesetas, about 2.4 million euros. On October 30, 2002, the second phase of the Sports City was launched, which meant that between 2002 and 2005 the Cabildo contributed another 3,906,578.68 euros to carry out various improvements.
Despite this important investment of public resources, the reports from the Tenerife Sports Club indicated, only four years later, that “the natural grass has been lost due to the impossibility of paying the invoices of the irrigation water providers. Artificial grass, due to lack of irrigation, endangers the physical integrity of athletes. There is a lack of surveillance to satisfy a minimum of security. Adequate staff are not available for maintenance. The artificial lighting has not been able to start up due to lack of liquidity to pay the corresponding fees before the competent bodies and the amount of the final work certificate. For this reason, the decision was made to extend for several consecutive years more than an extra million euros of contributions of public money, through an agreement with IDECO to maintain the lawn and the facilities.
At that time, prior to the years studied by the Prosecutor’s Office, more than nine million euros of public money had been allocated to these facilities, much more than the original value of some land that could have already been reverted to the public domain, as as stated in the initial agreement of this project.
The sports colors are intermingled with the economic interests of the great powers of the Island, who had bought part of the land of the Sports City, it seems that not only to finance the soccer team, but also to obtain a quite palpable enrichment along the way , as reflected in the open investigation.
While that was happening, what was the role of the City Council? He seems very active and involved. After the creation of the companies and the purchase of the NAP land, there were striking changes in the urban planning of the area.
In the General Plan project of 2013 and 2014, promoted by the municipal government of Fernando Clavijo, a huge Action Unit suddenly appeared in the area of the sports city. The land used for sports facilities was used to facilitate the construction of 99,000 square meters of offices and logistics facilities, which occupied almost all of the current sports facilities. In addition, the land use of the lucky businessmen who years before bought the 33,000 square meters of the Tenerife Business Park of the 21st century was changed, at the price of sports land, who could sell it as land with maximum economic benefit, good business, it does not seem that only It was a product of luck.
Many of us were shocked by this visible change in planning, which came to mean that many millions of euros of public funds, theoretically used to prepare that space, would be turned into rubble at an urban stroke. The joint action of neighborhood organizations in the area, denouncing this situation, and the opposition efforts at that time led us to promote a plenary initiative to stop this possibility, which fortunately helped to stop this obvious, more than lucrative operation.
Analyzing this history, to which are added the continued economic injections of public money items, which in many cases have been very difficult to justify in the general interest, we see how a space that should have already been recovered for 100% public use continues being a place to obtain more and more economic resources and carry out urban operations, also using sports colors that are very dear to thousands of people. The brazenness of the procedure seems absolute, paying totally disproportionate increases in the value of the land and with processes radically contrary to the general interest.
I am convinced that from the City Council we must resolutely ensure the good public use and the strategic future of these sports facilities, in addition to actively collaborating to unravel a tangle that indicates, as in other territories, on the grass of the football fields and behind the The colors of a club have once again built a more than obscure operation, a mixture of business favors and political interests that are difficult to separate. It is necessary to know to what extent the proposed urban changes were part of this operation.
Undoubtedly, the great challenge of this mandate is to put an end once and for all to those ecosystems of organized corruption, at the cost of everything, which were so well fed and nurtured in the past at the cost of millions of euros of public money. I firmly believe that the citizenry would not condone otherwise.
