The General Staff of the Civil Guard the treasury of the Command of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on suspicion that there have been irregularities with payments for minor works and other services, as well as in cash movements. Internal Affairs, in addition, has requested documentation of the accounts of the different units of the Armed Institute in the province in recent days to verify if all the reforms in the received barracks have really been carried out and if the current chief colonel, José María Tienda Serrano , favored the awarding of contracts to the builder lanzaroteño Ángel Ramón Tejera de León, better known as Mon.
Tienda Serrano, who has been in charge of the Tenerife command for more than 10 years, appears in the summary of the Mediated caser for a meeting that he held in 2020 in a hotel in La Laguna together with the aforementioned businessman and the major general Francisco Espinosa NavasandThe only one involved in the investigation who remains in prison. The General Directorate of the Civil Guard considers that the continuation of the chief colonel is unjustifiable, not only because of the time he spent at the head of the command, but also because of his connections with General Espinosa, the only one in prison of the twelve detainees in the extortion plot, his friendship with the builder Mon, and accounting anomalies discovered in the command center.
About twenty contracts
And it is that Mon executed around twenty contracts between 2017 and 2021 to rehabilitate barracks in the province of Tenerifeespecially to install a cork waterproofing system through its trading companies Angrasurcor SL and Solocorcho SL. The circumstance occurs that during that same period the builder did not take charge of any work in the Comandancia de the palmswhere it was vetoed by the then chief colonel Ricardo Arranz.
The Armed Institute prepares the replacement of the Tenerife colonel for his friendship with Espinosa and ‘Mon’
In view of possible irregularities, The Civil Guard has decided to control all outflows of money related to the Santa Cruz de Tenerife Command, a measure that, according to the same sources, was taken at least a year ago. This supposes that the general management had information of possible irregularities before the outbreak of the mediator casewhich on February 14 resulted in the arrest of eleven people, including General Espinosa, and a week later in the arrest of the national deputy of the PSOE by Fuerteventura Juan Bernardo Fuentes, aka Tito Berni. The twelve involved are accused of the crimes of bribery, money laundering, forgery, influence peddling and belonging to a criminal organization for extorting ranchers and businessmen.
Internal Affairs had already initiated an investigation at the request of a court in Ávila for the award of dozens of small-scale works between 2016 and 2017 to the companies of the Lanzarote builder in thirteen commands: Albacete, Algeciras, Alicante, Ávila, Badajoz, Castellón, Huelva, Jaén, La Coruña, Murcia, Toledo, Valladolid and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Among the defendants is retired Lieutenant General Pedro Vázquez Jaravathe highest-ranking figure within the organization chart of the Civil Guard, after the colonel in charge of Ávila between 2015 and 2017, Carlos Alonso, denounced that Jarava ordered him to contract with Mon the improvements to the barracks in the Castilian and Leonese province .
The decision to investigate the works of a Command is not new. The Anti-Corruption and Internal Affairs Prosecutor’s Office searched the office of the Army lieutenant colonel last September at the Civil Guard post in the Valencian town of Benimaclet for possible bites from at least ten small works in the province of Valencia. The awards under suspicion are minor contracts that are managed by the territorial units, since the contracts for the construction of new facilities can only be managed from the General Directorate of the Civil Guard.
The builder received twenty contracts in the Tenerife barracks between 2017 and 2021
The person investigated in this case has held his position as chief controller of the Economic Management Unit (UGE) of the VI Zone of the Civil Guard for 15 years, taking charge of the treasury that the Armed Institute managed in the Valencian Community. However, Miguel Ángel ET does not belong to the armed institution, but is a member of the Armed Forces since the Civil Guard does not have an intervening figure and staffs these posts with soldiers.
