The judge requests three years of bank movements from the room where 'Tito Berni' left 11,000 euros in one night

The judge of the Mediator case has requested the bank movements since January 2020 of several accounts related to the activities of the plot. Among them, those of the hotel restaurant where the former socialist deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo was staying in Madrid.

This is the hotel where Tito Berni celebrated “parties” with prostitutes paid by businessmen who sought the favors of the plot in the Canary Islands. The judge's resolution agrees to the Treasury's request to track the last three and a half years of movements in the account of that location, in which movements that it considers relevant to the case have been detected.

In particular, the judge focuses on what happened in April 2021, coinciding with one of those parties. In the local payment terminal, “there are two payments from an alleged party on 04/14/2021 linked to the POS of the La Carmela Restaurant located in the Victoria hotel where the former deputy is staying for an amount of €7,800 and €3,000” .

The investigated payment terminal is in the name of the company Resdibar SL, which operates the restaurant with “two forks, cafeteria and theater”.

The party was attended by, among others, the businessman Miguel Poveda Sierra, “who would pay for that party where company service would be provided at the hotel.”. The businessman had been “that morning with Curbelo in the Congress of Deputies”. In a chat located by the investigators, Poveda Sierra shows the payments to another businessman along with the text: “It's incredible.”

The judge highlights the “relevance” of the meetings at the hotel and considers that these payments are “the basis of the bribery under investigation”. “They are payments in kind that [the former deputy] receives from his efforts carried out by and for the group,” the order says.

“A common practice”

The judge adds that it is not “an isolated act, but on the contrary, “a habitual and continuous practice of payment of services, as it has been possible to demonstrate throughout the investigation, by recording numerous parties and meetings of this nature after the visits to the former deputy to Madrid by the businessmen […], these assuming the payment of such parties as payment of services for the management in favor of them, be it in contracts […] or in resolution of files”.

The list of suspicious bank movements includes those sent by the owner of the company that operates the restaurant to the couple of Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, considered the mediator of the plot.. Shortly before the party, on April 12, he makes two transfers for a total of 25,850 euros.

Days later, the company account receives separate deposits of 10,000 euros from one of the accused businessmen, Raúl Gómez Rojo.. As a concept, it appears in the first “prize paid once” and in the following, “2nd prize paid Once”.

The order issued on Tuesday by the head of Investigation Court 4 of Tenerife, María de los Ángeles Lorenzo-Cáceres, authorizes the Treasury to collect “in as much detail as possible” the data “of all the movements of the bank accounts indicated from the January 1, 2020 to the present”, as well as “any other information and complementary documentation” that the investigators of the Tax Agency deem necessary.