The Court of First Instance and Instruction Number 3 of Passion fruit opened an oral trial in piece number two of the five that make up the case opened in 2007 against the former mayor of the Granada municipality, Jaime González Cejas, and the seven former councilors (one of whom died) who formed the Local Government Board. The Criminal Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife will set the date for holding the hearing against those accused of an alleged continuing crime of urban prevarication, according to the Prosecutor’s Office; embezzlement of public funds, influence peddling and prevarication, according to the complaining party, Alternativa Sí se puede.
The Prosecutor’s Office requests for the seven former politicians the sentence of one year in prison and 11 years of special disqualification; The request of the complainants ranges from three years of imprisonment, a 400,000 euro fine and 20 years of disqualification for the former mayor, to two years in prison and 10 years of disqualification for the rest of the accused.
Judge Arabia Díaz Carreiras prosecutes Jaime González Cejas and former PSOE councilors Ana Esther Flores, José Antonio González Cejas, Nicolás Jorge, Rufino Acosta, Ana Casimiro and Fidel Rodríguez. The magistrate-judge imposes a global bail of 200,000 euros –100,000 to the former mayor and 14,286 euros to each of the other defendants–. She understands her honor, as stated in the order of last September 28, that «it is enough, especially taking into account the time that has elapsed since the facts prosecuted, as well as the possible attenuations of the sentence as a result of the delays in the procedure and the set of facts imputed to those investigated, not only in this separate piece, but in the remaining ones that started the proceedings».
planning licenses
In separate piece number two of this case, the legality of the urban planning licenses granted by the Local Government Board of Granadilla de Abona during the 2003-2007 mandate to the company Vimédano SL is questioned. In that period, the entity received four to build in El Médano buildings with a global capacity of almost 200 homes. The summary records that the municipal government made the decision to authorize said works with unfavorable technical reports that were omitted, apparently, at the time of granting the licenses.
2006
Year of the complaint
Alternativa Sí se puede, a political party that would co-govern with the CC and the PP from 2007 to 2011, filed the complaint that gives rise to this case, which has five separate pieces.
200
thousand euros deposit
The judge sets a bail of 200,000 euros -half of the 400,000 possible-, but 100,000 must be provided by the former mayor and the other 100,000, to be divided among the seven remaining defendants.
It so happens that the beneficiary company, Vimédano SL, bought, in 2006, the 440 shares that the former socialist mayor, Jaime González Cejas, owned in the company Médano Beach Sur SA, which is also part of other pieces separate from this case.
In this piece number two, the judge maintains Nayra Guzmán Hernández, then a municipal architect, as a defendant, for whom the Prosecutor’s Office and the prosecution request the same sentence as for the former councilors. However, the judge considers that “there is no place” for the criminal action against Manuel Pedrozo Raña and Alberto Moure Rama (Vimédano SL), “but only for the purposes of civil liability as participants for profit”. In other words, as beneficiaries of the constructions derived from the urban planning licenses obtained by the company.
Other separate parts
A year ago, Judge Dolores Gutiérrez Rebolleda transferred to the Criminal Court the separate piece number 3, in which the Prosecutor’s Office requested the disqualification (between 7 and 10 years) for those affected while the popular action raised a total of 62 years of imprisonment and 250 disqualification. It is based on the requalification of the land of the Médano Park partial plan, owned by the Médano Beach Sur company, which acquired it as rustic in 1987, became suitable for urbanization in 1994 through subsidiary regulations, and became in rustic of territorial protection and urbanizable sectorized not organized after the approval of the General Plan of Ordination (PGO) in 2003. The summary contemplates that its development was propitiated by two decrees of the then mayor approving the partial plan. The accusation understood that González Cejas is not competent to do so and the defense relied on the Law Regulating the Bases of the Local Regime to argue otherwise..
Separate piece four is also found in the Criminal Court, which affects only former mayor Nicolás Jorge, whom the accusation attributes to having failed to comply with the legal procedure by eluding the call for a public tender to hire the installation of the infrastructure required to implement DTT in Granadilla. The defense maintained that the person in charge of contracting was the mayor.
The complaint
Alternativa Sí se puede filed in 2016 the complaint that gave rise to this case and the preliminary proceedings 586/2007, which gave rise to the abbreviated procedure 3/2012, provisionally dismissed until the Provincial Court lifted it in November 2015. September 2016, coinciding with his penultimate day of work in said judicial district and with the date on which the CC and PP presented a motion of censure against Jaime González Cejas, the substitute judge of the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 3 of Granadilla de Abona, Juan José Gómez Neira, issued five orders declaring the abbreviated procedure and establishing 18,478,326.11 euros of joint bail for 13 investigated.
They were charged with 81 alleged crimes of prevarication, six of influence peddling and nine of embezzlement for granting licenses to build four promotions in San Isidro -linked to then councilman Fidel Rodríguez-, for the revaluation of the 440 shares of Médano Beach that the mayor sold Vimédano SL after granting it planning licences, for approving a partial plan related to companies owned by the councilor accepting financial compensation for the city council in substitution of two plots of land that corresponded to the town hall for compensation, for granting a municipal license to ITER for installing 130 photovoltaic panels (with two unfavorable reports) and 70 more without a license request and including the mayor as a partial purchaser of those panels, as well as for allegedly failing to comply with the procedure to install the DTT infrastructure.
