Canarian Coalition has once again become enraged in the City Council of La Laguna, governed for the first time in decades by a different party, in this case with the PSOE in coalition with United You Can and Avante La Laguna. The reason on this occasion was what happened in a meteoric municipal plenary session lasting just thirteen minutes that in reality only served for the mayor to read an institutional declaration for Women’s Day and for a point of order to be dealt with, the outcome of which was that the first municipal authority adjourned the session without debate or vote, despite the voice requests of the nationalist spokesman.
The plenary session had an extraordinary and monographic character, and was convened last February at the request of almost all the CC councilors (the one who was the Treasury councilor with the previous mayor, Fernando Clavijo, was missing) with the following statement: “Proposal of a calendar to comply with by the Corporation in relation to the reporting to the Plenary of the annual compliance audits”. What came to suppose an attempt by that political group to find or confirm irregularities in the budgetary management of the Corporation.
As soon as the plenary session began and just after the mayor read the aforementioned institutional declaration on Women’s Day, the spokesman for United We Can, Rubens Ascanio, asked for the floor to raise a point of order. This came to address, succinctly, the legal convenience that a plenary agreement could be discussed and approved in which the Corporation’s General Comptroller was urged to set a schedule of actions on its audits. The mayor then gave the floor to the municipal comptroller and the plenary secretary so that they could offer his opinion. Both agreed that such an agreement would imply an interference in the autonomy of the Intervention of the institution, and in the case of being adopted, it could be null and void.
The intervener took advantage of the occasion to reproach the Corporation as a whole for the fact that her department, even before she accidentally assumed her current functions, has been demanding more resources, both financial and human, to be able to undertake her task, among others, that of preparing the audits annual to which each city council is obliged since 2019. This lack of means would come creeping from the last corporations, all of them chaired by the Canarian Coalition until reaching the current one, which came to govern precisely in 2019.
After listening to both officials, the mayor, Luis Yeray Gutiérrez, adjourned the session without giving the debate the slightest opportunity, despite the voices of indignation that came mainly from the group promoting the plenary session, with his spokesman, Jonathan Domínguez, as the main value you From that moment on, Domínguez warned that his group would go to court.
The government group immediately issued a statement in which it recalled that the mayor “chose to adjourn the session” after listening to the reports of the Intervention and the General Secretariat of the Plenary, because “otherwise he could be committing an illegality.”
The government group believes that, in accordance with the law, “both the calendar and the files to be audited are the exclusive responsibility of the Municipal Intervention, so that a plenary decision cannot interfere with its powers.” And she recalled that “the secretary pointed out that the agreement proposed by CC could be considered null and void. And the intervener ratified that it was intended to put to a vote the exercise of a competence that corresponds to the Intervention to exercise it with total autonomy”.
Canarian Coalition also issued its statement ignoring, yes, the two verbal reports of the national authorities. In his opinion, what happened in the plenary session this Tuesday was “a democratic attack” when that group only wanted to know information “about the internal annual compliance audits of the consistory relating to the years 2019 and 2020 and to know the reasons why they did not They have been presented in ordinary plenary session, as established by the legal regime of internal control in Public Sector entities”. In fact, the statement of his plenary request did not say that, because what was intended was to set a “calendar to be met.”
CC considers that “it is the right of any political group to raise a debate on any issue that has to do with the public management of the City Council of La Laguna.”
Of the two interventions by the high-ranking officials, the CC spokesperson has only singled out the intervener’s mention of the lack of means, but reducing it to the current mandate: “The intervener has recognized that for three years the accounts of this city council” (…) “The intervention recognizes today that it does not have the tools to control the accounts and they have spent three years without any type of control of spending in the City Council”.
Domínguez believes that “the plenary session has been adjourned without having given the opposition the right to show its political position and that right has been curtailed, which leads him “to the courts”. “We are seeing that all this obscurantism in the economic management of the City Council of La Laguna, the only thing that teaches us is that they have a lot to hide and if they have a lot to hide they will have to explain it in the courts of La Laguna”, concluded the spokesman . At the moment it is unknown if any type of legal action has already been filed.
