Jose Maria Rodriguez |
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) How much insistence that they closed a booth after 11:00 p.m. “until whatever time it was”, regardless of prying eyes and photographers?
Because, if that dinner finally took place, as the intermediary that gives its name to the case assures that it did, the fifteen diners and the owners of the place were becoming “a Boris Johnson”, as it could be defined in colloquial slang, but also political, to the behavior that put the British prime minister in the pillory until he forced his resignation: contempt for the health regulations that his own government dictated in the still harsh stage of the covid-19 pandemic.
No more than six people at the same table and only until eleven
In the conversations that the Civil Guard includes in the summary, the intermediary Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte assures that the dinner he organized for the former deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo, the businessman Antonio Bautista Prado and twelve other people took place on October 21, 2020, still with the current state of alarm.
According to the historical repository of sanitary measures during the pandemic that can be consulted on the Community of Madrid website, that day in the Spanish capital restaurants had limited capacity to 50%, they could not serve at the bar, they could not sit more than six people at the same table and they were prohibited from accepting customers after 10:00 p.m., having to close at 11:00 p.m.
Always according to the summary, this is how Navarro Tacoronte recounted the preparations to Fuentes Curbelo, to whom the plot referred to both “Don Bernardo” and “Tito Berni”: “They are going to give me a menu (by) if you want to pass it on to my colleagues. Dinner menu and drinks, okay? Because you are going to leave tired, you will not have time to eat dinner and Ramses closes the doors at 11.
Given that Navarro Tacoronte addresses a deputy in that conversation, it is assumed that where they were going to “leave tired” was Congress, since there was a plenary session. In fact, the first vote of no confidence by Vox against Pedro Sánchez was being debated and the session ended at 8:55 p.m., as recorded in the Sessions Journal of that day.
“I have reserved inside the Ramses, quietly, for fifteen people,” continues the mediator, “just for us (…) It goes without saying that your food, that of Antonio (Bautista, another of the defendants, owner of a renewable energy consultancy ) and mine are in charge of my companies, okay?
Tranquility between screens
When Fuentes Curbelo finally agrees to the dinner plan, at 60 euros per head, of which 20 put “the company”, Navarro Tacoronte gives him the final details of how the meeting will be organized: “Hey, the reserved one is fucking mother. Complete tranquility. There are some screens on. No one has access to us and until the time we want, okay? I explain? No one is going to be able to access us, no photographs, no weird rolls, okay? Don’t worry”.
The summary does not detail which other members of the PSOE went to that dinner, much less if they knew that they would share a table with a businessman who was looking for contacts to establish himself in the Canary Islands Special Zone (the area of low fiscal taxation of the islands), to try to achieve contracts for the installation of renewable energies, presumably with the help of Fuentes Curbelo and the General of the Civil Guard Francisco Espinosa, the only one of the defendants who is in prison.
But, if that dinner took place, all the diners should know that the rules of the state of alarm in force that day forced them to not be more than six (both at the table and gathered for “any family or social event”) and to leave the Ramses at eleven.
General Espinosa kept 61,110 euros in banknotes at home when he was arrested
The general of the Civil Guard in prison for a week for his alleged involvement in the Mediator case, Francisco Espinosa Navas, kept in his house in Madrid when he was arrested 61,110 euros in banknotes, in bundles hidden in a shoe box and between the clothes from a drawer, money that the judge in charge of the case believes to be of “illegal origin”.
In an order issued on February 16, but made public this Wednesday, Judge María de los Ángeles Lorenzo-Cáceres describes the indications that make her suspect that this money comes from the commissions that the general allegedly charged businessmen in exchange for to facilitate business with other commercial companies or with the European security assistance project for the countries of the Sahel, which he directed in the last years of his career.
In this sense, he stresses that the income that the general received since 2019 in his bank accounts, both from the Civil Guard, and from the Spanish public foundation that administered the GAR-SI Sahel project or from Social Security, has been reviewed. once retired, with the conclusion that “they would not justify the origin of the 61,110 euros”, for which reason it presupposes its “illicit origin”.
