Former Mayor Arcos, José Luis Núñez (second from the right) and his partner in government, Manuel Erdozain (first from the right), during a visit to a construction site with members of the Cádiz Provincial Council in October 2013. EL PAÍS
There were a few years in which the City Council of Arcos de la Frontera, in Cádiz, was like a big family.
The problem was that it was in the most literal sense of the word.
From 2011 to 2014, the former mayor, José Luis Nuñez (PP), his 11 councilors from the government team and the former intervener turned the Consistory into a coming and going of brothers-in-law, uncles, sons, nephews, list mates and party colleagues.
In total, they made up to 150 alleged "illegal labor contracts" to 24 people close to them, according to the qualification letter made by the Jerez de la Frontera Prosecutor's Office in which it requests up to 12 years of disqualification for all those investigated for continued crimes of prevarication.
“They thought that was their farm.
It was a scandal in the town”, summarizes a source close to the City Council at the time, who prefers to remain anonymous.
Or what amounts to the same thing, that the mayor of the PP, his 11 mayors from this party and the localist Aipro —Alternativa Independiente Progresistas, a split from the PSOE— and the controller at the time, José Antonio Fernández de Álava, entered into “numerous employment contracts illegal, granting a public job to whom they deemed convenient, in some cases, due to exclusive family ties or because they belonged to the same party”, according to the prosecutor José Javier Yagüe in his qualification letter sent to the Investigating Court Number 2 of Arcos on June 20, as a preliminary step to the opening of an oral trial yet to be determined.
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The parade of up to 24 brothers-in-law, brothers, uncles, sons and party colleagues for various City Council positions took place in the period between 2011, when Núñez won the municipal elections, and 2014, the year in which the socialist councilor Joaquín Macías denounces the government team for these cases of alleged plugging.
The legal step came after the City Council chaired by the PP and Aipro filed up to four complaints against Macías for alleged irregularities in his stage as mayor between 2003 and 2011, three of them archived and a conviction for workplace harassment of a municipal architect.
Macías, today retired from the first political line —he is the driver of the second vice president of the Parliament of Andalusia—, remains in the case as a private accusation, although he prefers not to make any statements:
The alleged cases of plugging in Núñez and his people soon became a recurring conversation in Arcos, a town of 30,700 inhabitants where many know each other.
But Macías did not file a complaint until "he received an anonymous envelope at the PSOE headquarters in which he detailed the registrations and dismissals of those hired," according to the same source.
A good part of that tip-off, already contrasted with the municipal documentation and the statements of the accused, today constitutes a complex qualification letter in which the prosecutor has had to order the information in tables to be able to reflect so much entry and exit of personnel in the different municipal areas.
“They dressed the doll in such a way that the contracted ones were in each delegation for a while.
He was a 'you sign my brother-in-law and I your brother', summarizes this person from Arcos who knows the facts.
The analysis of the Prosecutor's Office covers more than 150 contracts made to 24 relatives in which cases such as MPG stand out, a brother-in-law of the mayor who was hired as a carpenter, laborer or officer up to 17 times by different delegations.
Among those involved, Núñez's niece also appears;
the sister of the Councilor for Social Affairs, Juana Morales;
the uncle of the mayor of Environment, Francisco Muñoz, or two nephews of the delegate of Jédula, Petra Macías.
The signings are of days or months, in positions of pawns, administrative or monitors and, sometimes, the same names jump from council to council performing different functions.
Intervenor Collaboration
Everything was carried out "without respecting the principles of equality, merit, capacity and publicity", according to the prosecutor in his letter, and with "the esteemed collaboration of the then intervener" who maintained "a passive position", despite knowing the illegality of hiring.
Yagüe attributes to one of the defendants, Carlos de la Barrera, the competence in those contract signatures, by virtue of the power as a delegate that the mayor granted him in a decree of July 2011. That was the only legal umbrella that those investigated They gave some alleged plugs that "grossly" breached the Spanish Constitution, three laws and the basic Statute of the public employee of 2007, according to the qualification letter.
The cases of plugging were so profuse that they even gave for a separate piece.
It was after one of the defendants acknowledged before the judge that the mayor, the Infrastructure delegate Sebastián Ruiz -who was also a PP senator- and the Urbanism delegate Manuel Erdozain -from Airpo- hired the daughter of the accidental inspector in Arcos in 2014, Antonio Muñoz, as a monitor for the disabled so that he could change some negative reports due to municipal liquidity problems, despite the fact that the woman had hairdressing studies.
For these facts, the Provincial Court of Cádiz sentenced the three politicians for bribery and prevarication in June 2019 in a sentence appealed today.
In addition, Councilman Francisco Muñoz was also investigated by the Prosecutor's Office, accused of stealing 16 tons of firewood from the Consistory.
Now, the 13 investigated face sentences of up to 12 years of disqualification for continued crimes of prevarication.
Of all the defendants, it is Núñez, already retired from politics, who faces the longest sentence, adding a possible sentence of eight years and another of 12. A different scenario is presented for Erdozain, who still holds a position as a councilman — now in the opposition—, and for Domingo González, then mayor of Culture and now spokesman for the municipal group of the PP in the plenary session of Arcos, just at the beginning of a course with pre-election airs before the municipal elections next May.
The aforementioned has refused to comment on the case.
From the direction of his party in Cádiz they have limited themselves to remembering that "the candidates have not yet been named."
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