The judge of the Court of Instruction of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria who is investigating the Siglo XXI Foundation for an alleged diversion of 12.51 million euros from the Canary Islands Government to accommodate unaccompanied migrant minors has decided to recuse himself in favour of the European Prosecutor’s Office, according to an order to which EL PAÍS has had access and which has been previewed by the local newspaper. Canary Islands 7. The judge was investigating, in addition to the foundation itself, four directors of the entity, who are accused of embezzlement of public funds, unfair administration and falsification of private and commercial documents. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office will have to decide in the next few days whether to take on the case.
Since the Canary Islands route was reactivated at the beginning of the decade, the Canary Islands Government has made use of a series of non-governmental organisations to manage the reception facilities for unaccompanied minors, who are paid per day per child. One of them was the Siglo XXI Foundation, based in Madrid, which received 12.51 million euros of the total of 136.9 million euros of public money that the Canary Islands Executive spent on the care and training of minors in four centres in Gran Canaria and Lanzarote between 2020 and 2022, according to the complaint filed in May 2023 by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. That is, 95 euros per minor per day; 72 euros, if the place was unoccupied.
The document presented by the prosecutor Javier Ródenas contains a detailed account of actions aimed at the “personal enrichment and/or private enjoyment” of the accused. Thus, the managers spent nights in hotels and underwent facial treatments with government funds, while the minors, for whom this money was intended, lived in poor conditions in centres that were in a “lamentable” and “alarming state of deterioration”, without adequate training activities or tasks, the prosecutor emphasises.
“The analysis of the bank accounts,” stated the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, and the “absence of justification-settlement of the expenditure paint a highly irregular, opaque and uncontrolled scenario in the justification of public money, which was taken advantage of by the defendants to obtain an illicit personal economic benefit at the expense of subsidized public money.” Their account includes both banking operations for cash withdrawals, as well as the “diversion of monetary flows to personal or family accounts” of the directors of the centers, and the “development of purchases of products or services for personal use and enjoyment that are financed with public funds.”
The prosecutor also asserts that the controls of the Canary Islands Government failed, and points out that the Executive deployed a “deficient, opaque, and lacking rigorous control of the economic-financial management of the budget items”. An idea that is conveyed by Judge Francisco Javier García García-Sotoca, who maintains that there has been “a lack of control and monitoring of the emergency contracts processed”.
The magistrate also explains that the operation of these centres in the years investigated is subsidised by the Canary Islands, but that 15.29 million were obtained from European Next Generation funds. Regarding the Siglo XXI Foundation, the judge’s order indicates that the Intervention of the Government of the Canary Islands sent him a document that reflected that 1.9 million paid to the foundation had been charged to “credits derived from the European recovery instrument Next Generation”. The General Directorate for the Protection of Children and Families, however, sent a subsequent report in which it maintained that although the application of the original credits corresponds to European funding, “by not being certified to be able to receive said European funds, which are received prior justification of the expense”, the funding was passed on to the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands. The judge, however, has rejected this last document and has decided to elevate the investigation to the community body.
What matters most is what happens closer to home. To make sure you don’t miss anything, subscribe.
KEEP READING
This is not the first case of misappropriation of European funds in the islands whose investigation has been passed on to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. In March, the department announced its intention to take over the investigation of the so-called Koldo case, which is investigating an alleged plot surrounding contracts for the supply of masks signed by the health services of the Balearic and Canary Islands.
The European Prosecutor’s Office has also seized the case of masks in the Canary Islands. This case is investigating the payment of four million euros during the pandemic by the islands’ health system to a vehicle sales company, RR7 United SL, for an order of one million masks that never arrived. The investigations have led to the indictment of the former director of the Canary Islands Health Service (SCS), Conrado Domínguez, and its former director of Economic Resources, Ana María Pérez Domínguez. Domínguez resigned from her post in November 2022.
#Judge #investigating #NGO #diverting #funds #unaccompanied #minors #sends #case #European #Public #Prosecutors #Office