Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) a Spanish public foundation, but it was financed with EU funds.
As reported this Monday by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC), the judge of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in charge of the Mediator plot has accepted that this part of the case is the responsibility of the European Prosecutor’s Office to investigate it because it is an alleged irregular use of community funds and has made available to them all the procedures that it has carried out with respect to those contracts.
The magistrate also leaves Francisco Espinosa Navas, the Civil Guard general accused in this plot, in the hands of the EU Prosecutor, who is still in provisional prison and who directed until 2021 the European project that sought to help Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Chad to improve security in their territory with the creation of teams inspired by the rapid action groups (GAR) of the Armed Institute.
The TSJC specifies that the European Prosecutor’s Office will not only become the body that will be responsible for examining from now on the use of these funds, but also the one that will have to decide if General Espinosa remains in preventive detention or is released.
The actions sent to the Community Office of the Public Ministry also refer to the participation of the Valencian businessman José Santiago Suárez Esteve, who received three drone supply contracts for the GAR-SI Sahel program in Mali, Niger and Mauritania and a quarter of material for CT Public Spaces (another European security program in Ghana, Kenya and Senegal).
GAR-SI Sahel (French acronym for Rapid Action Groups-Surveillance and Response in the Sahel) is a project of the European Commission for security cooperation with several African countries, administered by the International Foundation and for Latin America of Administration and Public Policies (FIIAPP).
The latter is a Spanish public body governed by a board of trustees currently headed by the First Vice President of the Government, Nadia Calviño, who ordered an investigation into the use of funds by General Espinosa after learning that the Internal Affairs Service of The Civil Guard recounted in the summary of the Mediator case an alleged favorable treatment to certain businessmen in exchange for bribes.
The judge of Santa Cruz de Tenerife asked him, specifically, for details of four contracts that total 2,352,278 euros, dating back to 2020 and 2021 and have in common that they respond to supplies of equipment for security projects in Africa (three for the project GAR-SI Sahel and one for the CT Public Spaces project).
The question hangs over the four of them as to whether they were rigged by General Espinosa, the only one of the defendants in the Mediator case who is in prison and who kept more than 61,000 euros at home in a shoe box and in wads of bills rolled up in clothes.
The investigators of the National Police detail in the summary of the case that the company Asesoramiento y Servicios de Drones SL, of Suárez Esteve, was awarded four supplies worth 137,569 euros. The Civil Guard raises the total amount to 232,101 euros. EFE