Day of confessions and clear doubts. The president of the Council of TenerifePedro Martin (PSOE), revealed yesterday that the mediator –Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte– tried to ‘entangle’ him in his business. First he insisted that he receive it in his official office and then he sent messages to his mobile. The end?: hold “political meetings.”
«His obsession was to see how to contact or have a relationship with me. Thank goodness I kept my distance.” stressed the socialist during an extraordinary plenary session of the Tenerife corporation to analyze the repercussions of mediator case In the institution. The surprise jumped, not because of the confession, but because in the midst of it, Navarro Tacoronte himself became present, in all of his being. By your side your communication advisor, the journalist from Tenerife Félix Rojas, ex-husband of the former Minister of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands Maria Teresa Cruz (PSOE).
The president of the Cabildo explained that it was Navarro, who went to his office to advise him against continuing as director of Sports To Angel Luis Perez Peña, who had denounced him for a crime of fraud. At that time, he asserted, he was unaware of the “relationship” of both, that from what is being learned about the case “It seems that things were not going well.” “But if someone comes to tell me that my director is committing an irregularity, I listen to it,” said Martín. “Just like if he texts me.”
However, Martin maintains, “the messages and calls” from the mediator were because “he wanted to have political meetings with me.”
And it is that Pérez Peña is, precisely, the origin of the Mediator case. A complaint filed by the former director general against Navarro allowed the head of the investigating court number 4 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife pull the thread After the arrest of the mediator, conversations, photographs and videos that implicated political officials and that they have given rise to the investigation in which 12 people are involved, one of them, General Francisco Espinosa Navas, imprisoned. And all with charges of bribery, documentary falsification, money laundering, belonging to a criminal organization.
The magistrate and the Police have evidence that they articulated an extortion plot to ranchers and industrialists. Hence, the opposition in the Tenerife Cabildo insists on pointing out the institution as the “zero kilometer of the plot.” In fact, the judge keeps a separate piece open in which she investigates bribery and influence peddling in that insular corporation.
Pedro Martín, who at one point in the plenary session ordered Navarro to shut up under threat of eviction, He also denied another of his “inventions”: that he intended to “bust” the Los Realejos City Council and its then mayor, Manuel Dominguez, current leader of the Canarian PP. “What nonsense!” he exclaimed.
Martín has no doubt that Navarro’s interest with his “tour” through town halls on both islands was “to win the will of the corporations or the councillors.” “The question is who one believes.” And, in that sense, he believes both the version given by Domínguez as that of the mayor of Santiago del Teide and leader of the Tenerife PP, Emilio Navarro. That is to say: they had a coffee and did not pay more attention.
This is how the PSOE leader from Tenerife defended himself yesterday against the accusations of the opposition in the corporation. Both CC and PP accuse him of varying his speech on the Mediator case at his convenience.
The spokesperson for the PP Zaida González, reproached Martín for “as a politician” having lost “his shame”, and assured him that if he has to “believe in something” regarding the Mediator case “it will be the recordings, which will come out (…) Everything is recorded. In court we will see what comes out ».
Martín also denied that there was any favorable treatment towards the mediator during his time as mayor of Guide from Isora. Although he admitted that that same morning he called the town hall, seeing published information in the press about a conversation between the mediator and his lawyer, also investigated in the case, in which they talk about having some detail with a mayor. And what they explained to him, he assured, is that Navarro Tacoronte “appeared one day” accompanied by a representative of Cajasiete offering sponsorship for some sports teams, but “no contract was reached.”
At the insistence of the PP on when he held that meeting with the mediator in his office in the Cabildo, if before or after the indictment of the former island director of Sports, Ángel Luis Pérez Peña, for the crime of false denunciation against Navarro. A question to which he replied that he did not remember “the exact date.”
He also denied, as the opposition groups pointed out, that it was he who introduced the mediator and the former director of Sports, at the presentation ceremony of a rally.
At one point in the session, tense at times, Martín had a confrontation when Navarro Tacoronte tried to intervene. “This is not a circus, you cannot intervene if you do not go outside,” he snapped at the mediator.
