Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE) exercise any public office, considering him criminally responsible for a continued crime of prevarication.
Despite this condemnatory ruling, the defense and the defendant have welcomed the sentence positively, insofar as they consider that it demonstrates that 90% of the contracts were carried out correctly.
They also appreciate the “exhaustive” work of the sixth room of the Hearing and declare themselves confident that before the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) it will be demonstrated that the 10% questioned also adapts to the regulations.
The defendant was manager of that entity between October 24, 2011 and June 4, 2015 and, later, he was accused of having committed fraud by dividing contracts that supposedly should have been awarded at one time.
Among them, the hiring of a legal adviser in 2013 with an initial duration of six months that was extended to add another year, without the advice being fixed for a specific project.
The court concludes that the manager carried out the hiring in order to avoid the application of the procedures that guarantee the principles of publicity and free competition.
The same occurs with an agreement signed in 2008 by a previous manager for the lease of services with an accounting consultancy company for one year and which contemplated a system of tacit extensions every twelve months.
In total, 43,190 euros of contracts that had the same object were added and that, therefore, should have been accumulated in a single one, which is attributed to the same reason as the previous one.
The judicial procedure began as a result of a report sent by the Comptroller General in 2015 to the Prosecutor’s Office, in which she warned that possible irregularities, especially in the previous year in projects such as ConéctaT, to carry out computer workshops in the form of “renting”, a contest to which three companies were invited.
The controller considered that a single contract should have been carried out and that the principle of publicity was violated, since in total the 18,000 euros were exceeded, which was then the limit to carry out direct contract awards, and 60,000 for works.
The Prosecutor’s Office also questioned the agreement with the Canarian Association of Popular Universities, for which 30,000 euros were paid and another in favor of the Arena and Laurissilva Women’s Federation for almost 25,000, for which reason they could not be carried out through minor contracts.
The report warned of the conclusion of an agreement with an entity for several minor contracts that came to a total of 153,383 euros with companies that were part of the same group.
The then manager appealed to an “unwritten” rule by which the contracts were divided by provinces to guarantee territorial equality, but the Court doubts the existence of that order.
In this regard, the now ex-manager gave an explanation that the Court considers “reasonable”, such as the need for the contracting to be carried out urgently, individualized by provinces, which would mean a shortening of the deadlines to execute it and comply with the themselves.
It could not be shown that Herrera had any type of prior relationship with the winning companies, so it is not possible to affirm that the procedure was chosen with the purpose of capriciously attributing the agreements.
During the oral hearing, he gave explanations about each of the cases under suspicion and assured that they always followed what the hired Legal Counsel indicated and that on occasions they had to resort to the emergency route.
The Court concludes that in other cases the method of billing may be questionable, but from there it is not possible to rule that the defendant acted with the intention of pretending that the contracts were awarded to different entities, since they were part of the same group.
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