The Eleventh Section of the Provincial Court of Alicante, with headquarters in Elche, has sentenced a former councillor for fiestas of Torrevieja Council to three and a half years of special disqualification for employment or public office, for a crime of prevarication.
The sentence, handed down based on the agreement reached by the accusations and the defendant’s defence, has been declared final by the Court, after the parties expressed their decision not to appeal it.
The facts declared proven in the judicial resolution date back to August 13, 2015, when the then councillor for festivities of the Torrevieja corporation, África Celdrán, then a member of the PSOE, signed, “lacking the powers to do so”, a contract for publishing the edition of the programs of the Fiestas de la Purísima and for the May Fair.
At the time, the actions were questioned by the then mayor, José Manuel Dolón. The group demanded her resignation, which was formalised in February 2017, hours after the Prosecutor’s Office requested 11 years of disqualification for the facts in his indictment and the opening of the oral trial.
In this decision, the defendant disregarded “the regulations governing the Procedure for Contracting Services by Public Administrations, established in the Law on Public Sector Contracts,” the Court specified.
“The contract would have zero cost for the City Council, which would also receive 2,000 euro from the publisher,” adds the sentence, which reproduces the facts that appear in a joint legal qualification presented by the Prosecutor’s Office, the private prosecution and the defence.
The Chamber applies in the sentence the mitigation of undue delays as highly qualified, as contemplated in the aforementioned joint classification.
