Oviedo (EFE) years in the Asturian administration for the irregular awarding of contracts.
Specifically, the Third Section of the Hearing has set at 2,180,759 euros the amount that the former Director General of Education, María Jesús Otero, the former civil servant Marta Renedo and the businessman Víctor Manuel Muñiz must face.
Civil liability had been pending after the ruling that the Supreme Court handed down in September 2019, in which, together with sentences of between two years and eight months and nine years in prison, fines amounting to 4.28 were established. millions of euros.
Now, Marta Renedo must return to the Principality about 1.5 million euros, for which Victor Manuel Muñiz must also respond jointly and severally up to a maximum of 198,000 euros, while María Jesús Otero must pay just over 690,000 euros.
The amount is far from the 4.9 million in which the Principality had quantified the damages caused to the public coffers by these three convicts, as well as by the businessman Alfonso Carlos Sánchez, who, according to the Court’s decision, provincial, it is not appropriate to set any compensation for lack of evidence.
The four defendants were sentenced to terms ranging from 2 years and 8 months to nine years in prison for a cause for which the former Socialist Education Minister José Luis Iglesias Riopedre is also serving a five-year prison sentence.
The former counselor, who held office in the socialist governments during the period of Vicente Álvarez Areces, did not cause damage to the public coffers, for which reason the Principality has not claimed any amount from him.
Judgment of the Supreme
The Supreme Court declared proven in the conviction that the businessmen Muñiz and Sánchez provided gifts to Otero and Renedo in exchange for awards in supplies of equipment, material and works for the ministries.
The ruling recognized that the objectivity and impartiality in the awarding of public administration contracts was corrupted since in some cases Otero and Renedo regularly awarded service contracts to their companies.
On other occasions they consented that the businessmen did not deliver, totally or partially, the material and merchandise that the Principality had acquired in such a way that the administration paid the invoices and did not receive in exchange the purchased supply or the stipulated work, for which reason the Businessmen invested part of the money withheld but not delivered in gifts and kept the other part.
The investigation into the ‘Marea case’ began in 2010 after a woman reported in Gijón that someone had opened a bank account with almost 100,000 euros in the name of her elderly mother.
The account was one more of those fraudulently opened by Renedo to hide the income from minor contracts that she herself authorized in favor of a company she owned, a thread that led to Igrafo and Almacenes Pumarín, which the investigation verified that they carried out also irregular practices with the Ministry of Education managed by Riopedre and Otero. EFE