Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (EFE) in rooms without toilets or closets, with their belongings always stored in suitcases.
This is the situation that Anti-Corruption describes in its complaint against four directors of the Fundación Respuesta Social Siglo XXI, an entity that managed this and nine other centers for foreign minors in Gran Canaria and Lanzarote, five of which it questions for their management of public funds. who financed them
Respuesta Social Siglo XXI assured the Social Rights Council of the Government of the Canary Islands, responsible for the protection of these boys as minors in distress, that they paid rent of 35,000 euros per month for the rent of the Acorán center, a property in the neighborhood from Tafira Baja in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.
“It is a totally disproportionate amount (…) an expense that is not only superfluous but bordering on the obscene,” alerted the inspection report made by the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office at that center, “given that it will be difficult to find not only in said environment but in the entire island of Gran Canaria any property with said monthly rent”.
Lack of control in spending
Anti-corruption cites this case in its complaint against four directors of Siglo XXI Social Response centers as an example of the “lack of control” in spending public money intended to care for helpless minors that, in its opinion, was allowed to that foundation, an entity which received 12 million euros from the administrations between 2020 and 2023 (1.87 million only for the Acorán center).
Although it does not point out in terms of criminal responsibility any position of the Department of Social Rights of the autonomous community, it does criticize as insufficient the follow-up that, in its opinion, that department did on how the centers for minors functioned.
“There is no administrative act intended to inspect or monitor the service, nor to permanently monitor it through the figure of the person responsible for the contract,” denounces the delegate of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office in Las Palmas, Javier Ródenas, who has requested the judge in charge of the case to order an exhaustive accounting audit of the centers managed by this entity both in Gran Canaria and Lanzarote.
Because, he warns, “the analysis of the bank accounts and the absence of justification-liquidation of the expense draw a highly irregular, opaque and uncontrolled scenario in the justification of the public money that was used by the defendants to obtain an illegal personal economic benefit to cost of public money.
Anti-Corruption focuses, among other issues, on the rent that the XXI Century Social Response Foundation paid for the house in Tafira Baja used by the Acorán center, because it is something that already caught the attention of the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office, when they went to inspect it.
Six to seven times more expensive than other centers
In this regard, it details that the investigated Foundation paid 605,000 euros for the rental of that property between June 2, 2021 and March 20, 2023 to the company Pine Point SL, a third of all that it cost the Government of the Canary Islands. that center, 1,857,130 euros (Social Rights paid 95 euros per day to the centers for minors received and 72 per available vacant space).
The Prosecutor’s Office suspects that amount not only because the monthly rent for the center multiplied by six or seven what was paid in other similar ones (35,000 compared to 5,000 or 6,000 euros), but because it has collected evidence that Pine Point paid, in turn, much less to the owners of the property.
It maintains, in fact, that Pine Point received 605,000 euros from Respuesta Social Siglo XXI for renting the Acorán property (money in turn coming from public funds) and paid its owners a total of 99,315, with a difference in its favor of 505,685.
“This means,” he adds, that Respuesta Social Siglo XXI “would be paying a notorious premium for the rental of this property, six times more than what it costs the merchant to dispose of it.”
Given these figures, Anticorruption focuses on the conditions of the center for which these amounts were paid: a building with a lack of conservation, cables to the air, broken wooden doors, windows in some cases with bars, rooms converted into rooms without sufficient ventilation and lighting and scarcity, if not lack, of toilets and showers.
To the point, he details, that its managers set up “an exterior module” outside the property with toilets, showers and sinks.
“Lacking the conditions to be considered housing”
The deficiencies were especially notorious in the so-called “inferior housing”, warned the report of the Office of the Prosecutor for Minors, “a type of building lacking the conditions, for ventilation, light, doors, etc., to be considered housing, being nothing more than a succession of rooms in which bunk beds were installed, without any of the rooms having wardrobes or any other furniture, the minors having to store their belongings in suitcases”.
Not only the Juvenile Prosecutor’s Office looked at the Acorán center, but also the Ombudsman, who in November 2021 warned about deficiencies in “the center’s facilities, its poor cleaning, the poor condition of the rooms, in terms of their conservation , with cracks, holes in walls, broken doors and windows, or without glass, unused spaces, given their poor state of maintenance.
The Ombudsman, remarks Anticorruption, “concluded that the fundamental right to education was not guaranteed, as well as reviewed the complaints of minors regarding the quantity and quality of meals, delays in health care and lack of clothing and footwear”. EFE