Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) I don’t know” or “I don’t know you”, to his questions about the alleged bribes in cash or in kind that he received. “His life is nourished by coincidences,” he told her.
In the recording of the statement he gave on February 22, to which EFE has had access, the Investigating Judge number 4 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the province’s Anti-Corruption Prosecutor insistently question Fuentes Curbelo about the multiple incomes that businessmen related to the plot made to the checking account of the grassroots football club that he presided over, the Tetir Sports Association, of Fuerteventura.
They want to know, specifically, why a small club in Fuerteventura receives money from businessmen from Gran Canaria and Tenerife with files that depend on the public body that he managed between August 2019 and February 2020, the General Directorate of Livestock of the Government of the Canary Islands, and in which he was succeeded until last summer by his nephew, the also accused Taishet Fuentes.
What interest can businessmen from other islands have in collaborating with a Fuerteventura club? ask the prosecutor and the judge. “Collaborate with grassroots football, I suppose, as Naturgy also does,” the former deputy defends himself. The judge is not satisfied and asks if, in exchange, these companies received at least publicity, although she already knows the answer: the one in Tenerife did not even appear on the team shirts or on the panels of the soccer field.
“I don’t know”, “I don’t know”, repeats Fuentes Curbelo, who in some cases says he doesn’t even know the benefactors of his club (or, as the Prosecutor suspects, corrupters of the plot).
Why does a company from Valencia pay a club from Fuerteventura?
What interest can a company from Valencia that sells drones have, for example, in contributing to grassroots football in Fuerteventura? “Why does a man from Valencia pay them 5,000 euros?”, sums up the prosecutor in reference to the defendant José Santiago Suárez Estevez, to which, after an initial hesitation (“I don’t know that man”), Fuentes Curbelo responds which means that he wanted to settle in the Canary Islands.
The judge increases the pressure of the interrogation with the case of the defendant Antonio Montesdeoca, a farmer who uses the services of the intermediary Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, because he is required to return a subsidy of 74,000 euros collected by his cheese factory in Tenerife for not having justified his destination .
In his answers, Fuentes Curbelo acknowledges that Montesdeoca came to his office presented by Navarro Tacoronte, but alleges that it was only a professional consultation, in which he limited himself to explaining the procedure for reintroducing the aid (the former Socialist deputy is a tax advisor by profession and has a cattle business in his family).
Again, the judge is not satisfied and asks how it is possible for a businessman, who “more than overwhelmed, is on the verge of ruin”, withdraw huge amounts of money from his accounts in those same days, transfer “collaborations” to a soccer club on another island and paid Navarro Tacoronte and Fuentes Curbelo himself for numerous meals and parties, some with prostitutes. And, after all that, she remarks, she feels “free” to send Fuentes Curbelo the file of his sanction, as stated on his cell phone.
“I don’t know, I didn’t get to read it,” he replies, but the judge does not let him finish and reacts by asking him about a party, collected in a WhatsApp message on March 26, 2021, in which Navarro Tacoronte tells him “Pay Alberto”.
“Pass me the catalog”
“You answer him: “’Pass me the catalog’ (it is inferred from the conversation that it is a catalog of women). What interpretation can this instructor give it? Is it another coincidence? Her life is nourished by coincidences, ”says the magistrate.
Fuentes Curbelo insists that he does not remember, but the instructor warns him that in the mobile phones intervened in the case there are photos of that party in which he is seen: “They appear in the case and I assure you that they have not been linked to the file not a quarter ”.
“Okay… but it’s another coincidence. And the ‘pass me the catalog’ must be an invention, an error in the transcription of what was found in his terminal”, added the judge, who had already begun to show signs of impatience many minutes before, when she asked the former deputy about the reason that moved businessmen to visit him in Congress.
“My question is: Is this walk of businessmen through the Congress of Deputies normal? Is it usual?”, asks the judge. “It is common for businessmen to come to Congress to present their problems and try to solve them,” argues Fuentes Curbelo, to which the magistrate replies that he was no longer the director of Livestock in the Canary Islands, but his nephew Taishet: “And do they have to go those businessmen to Madrid, to Congress, so that their issues can be resolved? Is the General Directorate ineffective and that is why they have to go to Congress?
The former deputy’s response was: “I don’t know.” EFE