Ciudadanos has decided to postpone for a month the definitive expulsion of Evelyn Alonso, a refugee councilor from the Santa Cruz de Tenerife City Council, in order to study the allegations presented by her against the file.
This Friday, in the plenary session of the Santacrucero City Council, a certification sent to the secretary of the Corporation should be taken into consideration so that it acts in accordance with the law and an October 2020 ruling of the Supreme Court to send Evelyn Alonso to the group of non-attached councilors and decree the loss of his positions and the emoluments he charges for them, thus losing all the “personal, political or economic improvements” acquired by his turncoat, according to the Supreme Court ruling.
However, as the newspaper advances The day and has been able to confirm Canarias Now, Citizens has preferred to carefully review the allegations presented by the councilor and, once done, continue with her expulsion. The objective is to avoid incurring defenselessness again, an argument that Alonso already resorted to in his first expulsion and that led to its annulment in June 2020, shortly after the motion of censure that returned the mayor’s office to José Manuel Bermúdez (Coalition Canaria) together with the Popular Party and snatched the baton from Patricia Hernández (PSOE) together with Matilde Zambudio (Ciudadanos). In other words, Evelyn Alonso’s maneuver expelled her own party colleague (Zambudio) from the deputy mayor’s office in Santa Cruz.
Last Friday, February 18, a letter from Citizens signed by its national general secretary, Marina Bravo Sobrino, was entered in the City Council register, in which the party reports that the resolution of the Disciplinary Regime Commission for which it has been produced Alonso’s expulsion is dated June 18, 2021. The councilor, always according to this certificate, committed very serious infractions contemplated as such in the statutes and in the party’s disciplinary regulations. Those infractions were disobeying the direct orders not to support the motion of censure and, once in the government group, together with the Canarian Coalition and the Popular Party, repeatedly ignoring the instructions of its formation, among others, those to leave the group of government. Likewise, she has disobeyed one by one all the indications of what she had to vote on each matter of interest to Citizens.
For this reason, Ciudadanos has formally requested the secretary of the City Council to apply the anti-transfuguismo agreements and the Law of Bases of Local Regime, which place councilors who abandon the candidacy for which they got their act or are expelled, as is the case. The most recent jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, based on a doctrine of the Fourth Chamber of October 2020, clearly establishes it: the turncoat councilors must become non-attached, as a consequence or due to an alleged turnaround, which “It prevents them from assuming positions or receiving remuneration that they did not previously exercise or receive and imply personal, political or economic improvements.”
Losing your emoluments: from 60,000 euros to 18,000
Currently Evelyn Alonso has a salary of 60,220 euros per year corresponding to the performance of the departments of Citizen Security and Mobility, Economic Promotion and Environment. That without counting the recent increase in salaries to the government group, which is not yet publicly recorded.
Before accessing the act of councillor, which was produced by the unexpected resignation of her predecessor on the list, Juan Ramón Lazcano, the defector had a salary of less than 18,000 euros a year as an assistant in the mixed parliamentary group, in which she appears now another fugitive from Ciudadanos, the deputy Vidina Espino, together with Ricardo Fernández de la Puente, who remains faithful to the acronym by which he obtained the act.
