Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) A senior official from the Canary Islands and an intermediary to stop him with a penalty of 74,099 euros had been useless, according to the Civil Guard investigation.
“You have deceived me, I have to return everything.” The latest report from the Internal Affairs Service of the Civil Guard before the judge issued an order to arrest the twelve involved reports that the businessman Antonio Montesdeoca, owner of a well-known cheese firm in Tenerife, tried in 2021 to get his money back. money.
On July 15 of that year, Montesdeoca wrote two messages, very angry, to the intermediary who had promised him that he could move his influences with the then General Director of Livestock of the Government of the Canary Islands, Taishet Fuentes (PSOE), so that the infraction against him forced to return in its entirety a European subsidy of more than 74,000 euros came to nothing or, at least, diminished.
Along with the WhatsApp messages, the businessman sent Marcos Antonio Navarro, the intermediary who gives his name to the “Mediator case”, a photo of the notification of the Subsidy Reimbursement Service of the Government of the Canary Islands. A few months later, in December, he wrote to him again to demand the money from him: “I need you to pay me back what I have lent you, I have to make a lot of payments.”
The Civil Guard explains in the summary that those responsible for this alleged bribery and extortion plot captured this businessman from La Palma in November 2020, thanks to the information handled by one of the alleged key pieces of the network, Taishet Fuentes, general director of Livestock de Canarias, who knew from his position the problems of Queserías Montesdeoca SL to justify how he had spent a subsidy and the sanction that was coming his way.
The task of contacting Montesdeoca was received by Navarro, the “mediator”, to whom Taishet Fuentes gave another weighty argument to convince the businessman to agree to pay his toll: the worst thing was not that he had to pay 74,099 euros in aid , the worst thing was that he was exposing himself to being sanctioned for lack of justification of all the European subsidies that his business had received since 2016.
When the mediator spoke with the businessman, he promised that he could “reduce the penalty” thanks to the influence of the alleged ringleader of the plot, the then socialist deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo. “Tito Berni”, as he appears in several passages of the summary, was the uncle of the director of Livestock of the Canary Islands and, in fact, had held that same position before occupying a seat in Congress.
Later, they offered to buy the mediation of another of the alleged leaders of the group, the General of the Civil Guard Francisco Espinosa, in prison for these acts for bribery and influence peddling, among other crimes, who had an important contact list in Canarias from his period as chief colonel of Las Palmas.
From Espinosa, whom he entertained with cigars, cheeses and food, Montesdeoca hoped to obtain help so that his products entered one of the main supermarket chains in Gran Canaria, Spar, and several five-star hotels on the same island.
As happened with other businessmen involved in the plot, Montesdeoca was required to start moving influences a first payment of 5,000 euros that had to be made to an account of the Tetir Sports Association, a soccer team from Fuerteventura that the deputy controlled in those dates Fuentes Curbelo, a native of that island.
5,000 “pens” for AD Tetir
“Look, I already got 5,000 euros for a soccer team,” Navarro told Taishet Fuentes by phone on November 7, 2020, to which he replied: “5,000… pens.” “5,000 pens for the Motesdeoca Cheese Factory team,” the mediator conceded.
According to the information compiled by the Civil Guard, the businessman came to pay, in addition to those 5,000 euros, another 2,300 to the socialist deputy, 5,000 to the general director of Livestock and 11,500 to the “mediator” in two deliveries. To that amount was added a payment of 3,000 euros to the lawyer who was going to write the allegations.
In December 2020, seeing that the efforts were not prospering as expected or thinking about the subsidies of the other years, Motesdeoca deposited 45,755 euros in an account of the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) with the concept “reimbursement aid”.
Some time later, the intermediary Navarro told the judge in charge of the case that “Montesdeoca paid a total of 74,000 euros so that the file would not prosper” and that “half of the money was spent on parties, drugs, whores and alcohol.”
In this sense, the summary states that every time Navarro took the businessman to Madrid to see Deputy Fuentes Curbelo in Congress or General Espinosa at the General Directorate of the Civil Guard, the event was celebrated for everything, in restaurants and hostess clubs And always, at his expense.
These two messages of November 17, 2020 from the cheese manufacturer to the intermediary bear witness to the hangover of those meetings: “I am bald after Madrid”, “I have 12 e left” (sic).
The disappointment came half a year later. According to the Civil Guard, Antonio Montesdeoca was not the only one who felt cheated by the Fuentes, Espinosa, Navarro and company, but the reality is that he ended up arrested on February 14 for corruption crimes. EFE
