Valga is a town of 6,000 inhabitants in the interior of the province of Pontevedra where a 73-year-old PP mayor has ruled with an absolute majority since 1991. In these three decades of dominance, José María Bello Maneiro has showered his government with a shower of diets for which the body in charge of supervising the administrations in Galicia does not find valid legal support. The bonuses questioned by the Consello de Contas in a recent report have even benefited, between 2017 and 2021, the officials in charge of ensuring legality in the consistory, that is, the municipal secretary and the comptroller. The Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Accounts investigates the 20,000 euros that each of these public employees has pocketed. “They are great professionals,” the popular Bello Maneiro defends them. The alderman and his councilors have distributed more than 300,000 euros in 20 years for meetings whose celebration and utility they controlled themselves. They charged for another decade, but it is not known how much. And they have already announced that they do not intend to stop doing so. “We are very clear that it is legal,” insists the mayor of Valga.
It all started in Olympic Spain in 1992. Bello Maneiro, who is now up for re-election, made his debut as mayor of Valga for an independent party after serving as a member of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular. That same year he set up some meetings with his councilors that were unrelated to the formalities of the City Council. The members of the local executive began to pay allowances for attending these meetings, a parallel commission without an official constitution or established functions, apart from the rest of the government bodies subject to the control of the opposition or officials. Payments were ordered by mayoral decree, explains the Consello de Contas. They were denounced in 2016 by the opposition and investigated for alleged prevarication and embezzlement. But the judges did not see a crime and archived them in 2019.
When the judicial investigations were still alive, in June 2017, the mayor decided to care a little about the appearance of those who stayed with his team and formally approved its constitution as a Coordination Commission. The report of the Galician Accounts Council concludes that from 1991 to that date “both the meetings and the perceptions of per diems for attendance” were carried out “without the regulatory support” required by law, but adds that in the following years and until today irregularities persist.
For example, the commission “violates the legal requirement that a public official be the one to act as secretary” and its functions are not defined. This last deficiency “makes it impossible to determine” if their work justifies that attendees receive allowances, explains the Galician supervisory body, which appreciates a “manifest weakness of internal control.” His reproaches are very similar to those made more than five years ago by the Association of Secretaries and Auditors of Local Administration (Cosital) during the investigation of the criminal complaint that ended up being filed. The Pontevedra delegation of Cosital is ratified in those criticisms after the irregularities pointed out by the Consello de Contas: “The legality of the collection of these assistances depends on the regularity of all these aspects.”
The mayor of Valga and his councilors have pocketed more than 300,000 euros with these allowances only in 20 of the 30 years that they have been charging them. There is no information about the remaining decade. The supervisory body quantifies the compensation that was distributed between 2017 and 2021 at 87,000 euros and reached 215,000 euros between 2003 and 2016, according to the report that the City Council sent to the court that investigated the case and to which this newspaper has had access. What they charged between 1992 and 2003 is a mystery because no official record was found in the municipal archives, as the council then admitted before the judge. A spokeswoman for the City Council has acknowledged that, despite the rebuke from the Accounts Council, the commissions “will continue to be held as is.” The mayor relies on the fact that the criminal investigation filed by the Provincial Court of Pontevedra in 2019 and urges the supervisory body to “rectify its error”.
Not a single hit from the secretary and the controller
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The report of the Consello de Contas highlights that the payments to the mayor and councilors of Valga for attending this parallel commission have not received any hit from the municipal intervention since 2017. It was precisely around those dates when the comptroller José Juan Vidal Vilanova and Secretary Juan Manuel Salguero del Valle. Both were appointed “by accumulation”, that is, they began to work for a few hours in Valga without ceasing to perform the same functions in their original consistories (Sanxenxo and Ribeira, respectively). In exchange, his salary was increased with “a bonus of up to 30% of his fixed remuneration” established by law. But it was not the only climb.
The controller signed a report justifying that he himself had to collect allowances. “It is necessary that I go to the Valga City Hall at least once a week, generating significant expenses that must be met,” he argued in his opinion, collected by the Consello de Contas. This is how he and his partner Salguero began to collect allowances for living and locomotion expenses that the supervisory body sees as contrary to the regulations: “According to the current legal framework, the payment of allowances to civil servants in accumulation is not foreseen ”. The Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Accounts, after the opinion of Accounts, has issued a letter in which it appreciates indications of accounting responsibility in these payments. It also puts under suspicion the diets received by the mayor of Catoira (Pontevedra), Alberto García (PSOE); the councilor of Vilasantar (A Coruña), Fernando Pérez (PP); and the former mayor of Trazo (A Coruña) José Dafonte, formerly in the PP.
Among the irregularities that have led to the investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Accounts in Valga, it is included that the high officials charged the municipal coffers with lunches and dinners without having justified such long hours and, in the case of the controller, the tolls of highway without presenting the tickets. The Consello de Contas report details duplications (expenses for maintenance, locomotion and tolls twice in the same day) and settlements of allowances “every month of the year”, as if they never took vacations. In 2021, when they learned that the municipal opposition had denounced the matter, both officials stopped asking for these compensations. In statements to this newspaper, the Valga inspector maintains that they did not request them more out of “prudence”, not because they doubt their legality.
“They have the money reserved there,” says the socialist spokesperson in Valga, María Ferreirós. “If the report from the Accounts Council had been favorable to them, they would end up charging it.” Ferreirós was the one who denounced the rain of Valga diets before the Galician supervisory body. She says that the mayor boasts that in his more than 30 years holding the baton of command there has not been any secretary or auditor who has objected to his decisions. “Can you be so perfect?” Ironically the socialist mayor. Bello Maneiro, he continues, has surrounded himself for a good part of his long political career with secretaries and accidental interveners, without authorization. “An accidental intervener came to go with him on the electoral lists and he had a secretary who was the daughter of a builder who had contracts with the City Council,” says Ferreirós.
The college of auditors and secretaries agrees with the Consello de Contas in that the regulations in Galicia do not allow these civil servants with accumulated functions to charge per diems, but they ask the Xunta to regulate them. “The perception of these compensations should not be illegal and that is why we are carrying out actions to modify the regional regulations so that they expressly collect it,” says the entity. The auditor Vidal Vilanova, for his part, assures that there are “very many” cases of secretaries or auditors who, despite everything, receive these remunerations. “It is absolutely legal and appropriate, and a common practice. I have been in the profession for 31 years and I have always received those allowances ”, he affirms about his time in Galician municipalities such as Rianxo, Porriño and Santiago. “It’s also a ridiculous amount,” he adds.
Neither the inspector Vidal nor the secretary Salguero are unknown officials. In 2018, En Marea brought the relations between the Valga City Council and companies managed by Vidal to the Prosecutor’s Office, but the case was filed. In 2014, the name of Salguero was heard in some controversial police bugs between popular officials of the Xunta and the Santiago City Council within the pokemon case. In those conversations, the PP politicians maneuvered to get rid of the then municipal secretary of the Galician capital, whom they considered uncomfortable for the plans of the mayor, the popular Gerardo Conde Roa. They explained how they intended to force the replacement of him by Salguero. The latter did not last long in Santiago’s position and ended up dismissed because a sentence declared his appointment null and void. Salguero has not responded to this newspaper’s offer to give his version.
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