Carmen Luisa Castro, municipal spokesperson for the Popular Party, filed a complaint with the Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Crime of the province (on March 20) to the mayor of GuimarGustavo Pérez, and his predecessor and today first deputy mayor, Airam Puerta, for the alleged crimes of administrative prevarication, forgery in public document, embezzlementfraud and/or illegal exactions. The cause is the “habitual, unjustified, abusive and presumably arbitrary use of emergency contracting.”
The former mayor warns of “possible corruption” and “alleged counterparties” in the management of three files, referring to the slopes of the Santa Lucía nucleus and the Las Bajas area and the construction of the sanitation network in the Fátima neighborhood.
In addition to considering that the causes that justify the emergency are not given in any of the three works, Luisi Castro warns of a supposed interest in using the figure of the emergency to evade “compliance with the legal principles of equality, transparency and free competition”. In his opinion, this type of contracting was used, “presumably, as a way of carrying out awards of works or services to related persons or entities.”
In the case of the Fatima sewage system, he explained that there is a decree of December 28, 2021 by which the work is awarded to Wawa Canary Islands SL (company created a year earlier, complaint) for 2,742,994 euros. This decree is classified as false by the local government and both Airam Puerta and the municipal secretary, signatories to it, deny the veracity of their digital signatures. This matter was transferred to the Prosecutor’s Office by the mayor, Gustavo Pérez.
The decree of the contracting of the work in Fatima dates from a day later. Luisi Castro stated at a press conference that “A businessman paid 100,000 euros (in two transfers) for the award of said work”. Previously, on June 9, 2021, the City Council hired an engineer to draft the project.
Regarding the project of the slope of Santa Lucía, Castro denounces that the Consistory paid the 330,755 euros of the award, but “only around 25% of the work was executed”, carried out in the first half of the mandate.
On the slope of La Bajas, work contracted for 342,865 euros, «the total invoicing formalized (…) amounted to a figure close to 1.5 million». In addition, the residents were evicted for three months at the expense of the company, but the contract for the execution of the work was for six months, Castro denounced. The works began on May 4, 2021 and were paralyzed almost five months later.
The Prosecutor’s Office accepts the complaint of the PP and collect documentation from Guimar Town Hall. Of these three files, the only decree signed by Gustavo Pérez, the current mayor, is that of stopping work on the Las Bajas slope.
