The court accuses the Sitges City Council of awarding minor contracts to entities of the same family "without due motivation"

The Investigating Court number 8 of Vilanova i la Geltrú close to the mayoress of Sitges, Aurora Carbonell (ERC), and other members of the City Council of this town for alleged corruption in the award of services and subsidies to entities of the same family. According to court documents, to which this medium has had access, the investigators point out that the 13 defendants, among whom would be the 11 arrested this Wednesday and who were released with charges, had allegedly committed the crimes of prevarication and embezzlement between 2017 and 2021 by authorizing “multiple minor contracts absent from the secretary's legal report, when according to the applicable legislation it would be mandatory.”

In this way, the court indicates that “throughout the investigation, it has been verified that the Sitges City Council continuously awards minor contracts, presumably without due motivation or merely concise and lacking the minimum argumentation to appreciate said need for contracting “. These awards “have gone to favor the same entities and suppliers, all of them related to each other”, according to the court, since they make up a married couple and their two children who appear as managers or employees of associations such as Taula del Tercer Sector de Sitges, which between 2018 and 2021 he received close to 330,000 euros for gardening work and beach cleaning by the Consistory.

In addition, they also created other cooperative societies in which they received subsidies and awards.. The investigators point out that these contracts were below the legal limit, 15,000 euros, “although for this they would have opted for a fractionation to avoid exceeding the legally established threshold and that, taking into account the object and nature of the contract, it had been mandatory to be subject to of the timely tender”. The court indicates that these providers allegedly “presented invoices with periods of provision of services prior to the effective formalization of the corresponding contracts, in such a way that once the service was provided, months later the contract would be signed without being informed of its nature as emergency”.

Thus, the investigators indicate that the suspects divided the amount of the contract that is adjusted to the quantitative limit of the minor contract, the principles of publicity and free competition that must be present in administrative contracting were dispensed with, the services were granted to the same entities and they provided as justification for the subsidies “false documentation” or that corresponds to “personal uses” such as “invoices for private household appliances or purchases of products for domestic use” that was accepted “by those responsible for the managing bodies and the city council of Sitges”.

The court indicates that one of the members of the investigated family allegedly received “donations for 'food, hygiene and to emancipate oneself' and for his work as a volunteer”, in addition to being hired by the Taula Tercer Sector. In addition, the City Council gave them land to make “emotional orchards” the entity invoiced the maintenance of the land or improvements such as the electrical installation “. “As far as the Sitges City Council is concerned, and from where the annual subsidies that are granted by the direct concession agreement proceed, during the investigated period there are numerous minor contracts in favor of the entities” investigated that “with identical concepts , usual and predictable should have been tendered”.

Intervention Alert

On the other hand, in the open judicial procedure there are reports from the Sitges City Council Controller for the years 2018 to 2021 in which she warned of a possible irregular division of the contracts awarded to the Taula association of the Sitges Third Sector. This is stated in a document on minor contracting and possible divisions of that period that was delivered to the plenary session of the City Council in April 2022 by a municipal auditor who left office a few days later.

The report, to which Efe had access, monitors the years 2018 to 2021 and warns that in the four years there was a possible division of the contracts awarded to the cooperative, which charged 45,000 a year under an agreement signed with the City Council of Sitges and, on the other hand, between 20,000 and 40,000 for different garden maintenance tasks or beach cleaning and the toilets installed on them.

Due to the amount of the contracts and because they are “recurring benefits”, the Comptroller considers that these services should have been the subject of a bidding process through an open procedure. In addition, it recommends “analyzing whether the required expense actually corresponds to a subsidy or if it is a provision of services that may be subject to bidding” and urges “financial control of the agreement to be able to conclude to that effect”.

The document indicates that in 2018 the Sitges Third Sector Taula received 98,996 euros, 48,950 of them for the agreement and the rest for various contracts of a maximum of 18,000 euros, the limit established by law to consider them minor. In 2019, it received 60,736 euros, of which 45,000 corresponded to the agreement and the rest to minor contracts, in 2020 a total of 80,480 (45,000 from the agreement and minor contracts) and in 2021 a total of 88,347 (45,000 from the agreement plus minor contracts ).

The Intervention also identifies contracts with the association in which “the benefits, of a recurring nature and for the same services”, are carried out by natural persons, with the risk that the relationship with them “could end up being classified as an employment relationship”.. The Intervention also warns that in the minor contracts awarded by the consistory in the period analyzed “the legal report of the municipal secretary does not appear”, despite the fact that the Generalitat establishes that this document or at least a note of conformity is mandatory.

Operative “correct”

The court must receive the report from the Police on these awards based on the documentation obtained in the entries and records of this Thursday. Later, he will begin to summon the mayoress and the rest of the charged charges and municipal officials, who after their arrest did not want to testify before the police, to testify as investigated.. At the moment, only the couple who received the minor subsidies and contracts remain under arrest and will go to court this Friday.

The operation, which focuses on alleged irregularities in the awarding of subsidies granted to the Sitges cooperative and possible splitting of contracts, derives from a report from the National Police that, in part, is based on a report from the Intervention on the accounts of the consistory. The court indicated that for the moment no police report has been presented derived from the proceedings carried out on Wednesday.

The arrest of the mayoress generated a lot of controversy since ERC, her party, described that she suffered “the pain of the news” when she was arrested before the media. However, the senior judge of Barcelona, Cristina Ferrando, without knowing the case and appealing to her more than 20 years of judicial experience, indicated that the police operation was “absolutely correct from a technical point of view.”. The judge indicated that “all police forces are subject to constitutional measures” and that after an arrest those investigated can go to court or leave the police station on provisional release, as was the case with those arrested in Sitges.. “A priori it is not something strange, it is something absolutely common,” he said.