The Criminal Court Number 4 of Santa Cruz of Tenerife has indicated the beginning of the oral trial against the former mayor of Buenavista del Norte, former senator and former vice president of the Cabildo de Tenerife Aurelio Abreu Expósito (PSOE) for next February 6, 2023, almost 17 years after the alleged irregular commission of the drafting of the residence project for people with disabilities in the northern municipality, in his last stage as mayor. The complaint was filed by the current Buenavista mayor, Antonio González Fortes (SSP), in 2012 and was also assumed by the Prosecutor’s Office at the end of 2018, when a request for a sentence of 8 years of disqualification was announced for an alleged crime of administrative prevarication.
Along with Abreu, the official who worked as secretary-controller at the time of the alleged irregular award and without public tender of this contract valued at around 270,000 euros also appears as a defendant in this judicial process. According to the Prosecutor’s Office at the time, Abreu would have irregularly commissioned this work to a company of which the former mayor of the PSOE in Santa Cruz de Tenerife Ramiro Cuende was one of the owners.
To finance the project, the northern Consistory had received a grant from the Ministry of Social Affairs of the Government of the Canary Islands worth 162,000 euros. That was the amount that was finally paid to the Cuende company, “which did not claim the remaining amounts,” according to Fortes at the end of 2018. Sí se puede will also participate in this process as a popular action.
The contract with the company Cuende y Gutiérrez Asociados was formalized, according to the aforementioned letter from the Prosecutor’s Office, “with a resounding and deliberate circumvention of the administrative contracting regulations that, due to his position, he could not ignore, and that imposed, given the amount of the contract, the initiation of a public tender procedure’. For the prosecutor, the non-convocation of the mandatory contest was made with the purpose of entrusting the drafting of said project to a certain company.
The contract included the drafting of the basic and execution project, valued at 160,000 euros, as well as the construction management, which had been budgeted at 90,000 euros, although it never materialized or was paid. Regarding the accused official, he is accused of prevaricating “by omission” by failing to fulfill his obligation, as intervening secretary at that time of the Buenavista del Norte City Council, to warn of “the flagrant and gross illegality of the payment” proposed by the Mayor’s Office.
