The former head of Fairground Accounting sentenced to five years in prison

The trial against the former head of fairground accounting It took place last September and the Jury Court found him guilty of the acts of which he was accused, as disclosed at the time. Ignacio Castillo worked with an employment contract and uninterruptedly for the Tenerife Fair Institution from 1989 until his retirement, on June 17, 2016. Until 2005 he had administrative functions and, over the next eleven years, he was in charge of « direct, coordinate, supervise, control and execute the tasks of accounting for notes, as well as the presentation of the company’s accounts, reports and audits ”. And, as already explained, it also received and accounted for all the cash that entered the public company without anyone controlling that work. An example of the amounts it handled were the tickets to the different fairs held at the fairgrounds.

The magistrate affirms in the sentence that the accused, “in the exercise of his public functions and abusing his position as head of the Administration and Accounting Service, seized 11,222 euros.” A court of First Instance had sentenced him in September 2007 to pay a monthly pension to his ex-wife of 510 euros as a result of a Family trial. And the aforementioned judicial body communicated the resolution to the Tenerife Fair Institution to deduct such amount from Castillo’s payroll. However, the convicted today took advantage of his position of responsibility to make 15 direct transfers of 510 euros each from the account of the public company of the Cabildo to the account designated by the Court. Such events occurred between October 2007 and December of the following year. Of that figure, he later returned nine transfers to the fair institution, for which he owed the public entity 3,062 euros.

And, to hide that debt, according to the magistrate, he made a fictitious accounting entry in the cash journal of December 31, 2008. The annotation contemplated that the 3,062 euros would be returned by check in April 2009, but that document did not exist , so he never returned such an amount. And, in December 2009, the same Court of First Instance again required the Tenerife Fair Institution to deduct another 510 euros per month from Ignacio Castillo’s payroll to pay a debt with his ex-wife that amounted to 9,000 euros. But again, Castillo, instead of deducting the aforementioned amount per month from his salary, made direct transfers between the account of the Tenerife Fairgrounds to the account set by the Court. In total there were 16 transfers between January 5, 2010 and December 20, 2011. The defendant made two new fictitious entries in the accounts of the public company. One of them was for 6,120 euros and then he issued a receipt in which he, as head of Administration and Accounting, received from himself a check from Caja Madrid for the aforementioned value. However, there is also no evidence that such check was delivered or that the amount had been paid. The second entry to cover the aforementioned debt was 2,040 euros and was recorded on December 20, 2011. But there is no evidence that he had paid that figure.

Vouchers

The magistrate also considers that Castillo, “guided by the intention of obtaining an unjust enrichment, in the time period between September 22, 1998 and June 26, 2015”, He took advantage of the charges he held to seize «9,219.71 euros from his box, leaving a note of it in the form of 73 vouchers or annotations that they referred to the outflow of money for his personal use, the amounts of which he never justified, nor does it appear that he re-entered them into the Institution, nor that he gave part of them to the Directorate “, nor to the agency in charge of payroll to deduct such your salary figures.