The Reparos case “was criminal.” This is how the chief prosecutor of the Canary Islands, María Farnés Martínez, stated this Tuesday regarding the second of the cases that reached the Supreme Court with the current president of the Autonomous Community, Fernando Clavijo, as the main defendant. In an interview given to the Ser channel, the head of the Public Ministry in the Islands recalled that both the opinion of this body and that of the judge who instructed him in La Laguna and that of the Supreme Prosecutor’s Office was the same: “that was criminal”.
The Reparos case was the name given to a criminal case opened following the complaint of several opposition councilors in La Laguna against the former mayor of the city, Fernando Clavijo, general secretary of the Canarian Coalition and current regional president, by extending dozens of contracts without legal coverage, without holding the mandatory public tenders and against the objections of illegality formulated by the auditor.
Clavijo, who appeared before the Supreme Court when he was elected senator for the Autonomous Community in 2019, managed to have the case filed in the high court, which has not changed the chief prosecutor’s mind: “The Prosecutor’s Office considered that this was criminal, the Supreme Court has said no, and I no longer have anything more to say” (…) “As many times, there may be signs of a crime and, for whatever reason, it may not come to fruition,” Martínez concluded.
The Reparos case was the second criminal case that the Supreme Court filed against Fernando Clavijo during the time in which he maintained his status as a senator. The first was the so-called Crane case, also due to a complaint promoted by the municipal opposition of La Laguna that found support in the Public Prosecutor’s Office. In that case it was the management of the municipal vehicle removal service at the time when Clavijo was the city’s Security Councilor, before becoming mayor to replace Ana Oramas. Here, the Cranes case for the uninitiated.
