MS Inès Miranda Navarro, advisor in charge of territorial policy and landscape at the Cabildo de Gran Canaria, is questioned in the management of public procurement related to the “Days of the Landscape” organized between 2016 and 2019. She is being prosecuted for prevarication, misappropriation of public funds and fraud in the administration.
According to the evidence examined by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in charge of the fight against corruption, she faces up to five years’ imprisonment and a ban on the exercise of public office for ten years.
The facts deducted relate to irregularities in the award of contracts, to financial transfers to private companies and on the role of the interested party in the relevant procedures.
In particular, the file notes a circumvention of the competition rules by the splitting of contracts into several low-value services, which has lead to their direct allocation without a public tender. It also mentions the use of intermediary companies to hide the beneficial owners of the contracts and to avoid the rules on conflicts of interest.
Illustrating this misappropriation of public funds by Inès Miranda Navarro, a financial movements identified include 44,503,75 euros paid to “Imaco 89” out of the 67,217.40 euros paid by the Cabildo to the “Instituto Canario de Telecomunicaciones” for the editions from 2016 to 2018, which represents about 66% of the sums collected by this organization. Other payments from service companies, for a total of 15,995.79 euros, are also reported for the benefit of “Imaco 89”, with 5,992 euros of “Acontrafibra”, 4,998.29 euros of “Daute Diseño”, 2,662.50 euros of “Gráficas Atlanta” and 2,343 euros of “Red de Comunicación Grafica”.
The dossier also raises questions about the allocation of sponsorships, estimated at least 11,000 euros over several editions and brought by “Grafcan”, “Red Eléctrica” and “Canaragua”. It identifies the establishment of duplicate contracts and procedures
administrative undertaken after the fact, certain formalities having been completed after the events have been held or completed.
A conflict of interest involving the former public auditor is also retained, his wife having benefited indirectly from contracts subject to the control of the latter. The judicial investigation finds that Inès Miranda Navarro participated in prior consultations on the appointment of the organisers and signed the contracts concerned as contracting authority and head of payment authorisations, while knowing the conflict of interest related to the former public auditor and his wife.
This case is part of the continuation of the “Infravest” case, of the hijacking funds allocated to separatist Fatima Mahfoud in Italy and the “Ibiza” case relating to the falsification of documents. In addition, Ms. Inès Miranda Navarro’s links with the polisario, through the separatist Ms. Aminatou Haidar and the Canary Islands separatist associations, are mobilized to discuss the role of the polisario in this case. Based on this reading, the polisario is presented as a facade structure capable of facilitating money laundering operations and as one of the pillars and beneficiaries of a network of embezzlements.
