Santa Cruz de Tenerife (EFE) on the agenda of a plenary session the act by which the consistory was going to take legal knowledge that the councilor had been expelled from the PSOE.
On November 26, 2020, the plenary session of the Arona City Council was to formally receive notification from the PSOE that Mena had been expelled from the party two weeks earlier, on the 13th.
If the City Council had learned of his departure from the PSOE, Mena would have been forced to move to the group of “non-members”, and in his government team they understood that this paved the way for the opposition to submit a motion of no confidence.
However, the same day of the plenary session, the mayor withdrew this item from the agenda, relying on a report from the City Council secretary, Pedro Javier Hernández, who recalled that Mena had challenged his expulsion and maintained that the City Council could not apply it with all its consequences until it was firm.
The complainants, Dácil María León, Luis José García and Juan Sebastián Roque, alleged that both the mayor of Arona and the municipal secretary knew that the PSOE regulations do not provide for the sanctions to be suspended until the appeals are resolved and that, for Meanwhile, Mena and Hernández had prevaricated by withdrawing the item in question from the agenda of the plenary session.
To this argument, the Secretary of the Consistory responded in his report that the fact that the PSOE did not recognize suspensive effects to appeals in its organization regulations could not bind the City Council and recalled that, in administrations, appeals suspend the effects of the sanctions.
The Provincial Court agrees with the Court of Instruction number 4 of Arona in that neither the mayor transgressed, because he withdrew the point covered by a legal report from the secretary, nor did this official commit a crime, because he expressed his legal opinion on the matter with arguments that had to be taken in consideration.
The magistrates admit that the plaintiffs believe the reasons of the municipal secretary are “disputable”, but they emphasize that his report “cannot be accused of arbitrary”, which by itself closes the way to raise a crime of prevarication.
Months later, the situation took a 180 degree turn, when the Court of First Instance number of Arona (Tenerife) annulled the expulsion of José Julián Mena from the PSOE due to formal and substantive defects in the disciplinary file to which he was subjected.
That resolution meant Mena’s return to socialist militancy. In fact, the PSOE of Arona has released this Thursday the ruling of the Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in which it emphasizes that José Julián Mena is its general secretary and refers to the complainants as “defendants” who wanted to “judicially beat” the mayor instead of confronting him “at the polls.” EFE