The corruption of a second general shakes the Civil Guard

General Pedro Vázquez Jarava is decorated, in May 2014, by the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, in a ceremony held in Valdemoro (Madrid).civil guard

General Francisco Espinosa Navas, one of the alleged leaders of the plot of the

together with the former socialist deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo,

, is not the only one with this rank in the Civil Guard who is being investigated by justice for corruption.

Another high command of the armed institute, Lieutenant General Pedro Vázquez Jarava, has been charged since January of last year for alleged rigging in the award of nearly 200 maintenance works in barracks of 13 commands.

This general was, until his retirement at the beginning of 2018, the person in charge of the General Support Subdirectorate, one of the most powerful positions within the Civil Guard when managing the financial and patrimonial resources of the institution.

A second high command, Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Alonso, from the Ávila command is also accused of these events.

In addition, the Ministry of the Interior dismissed a third party on Wednesday, Colonel José María Tienda, head of the Civil Guard in Tenerife, on suspicion of his involvement in the events.

More information

Interior dismisses the head of the Civil Guard in Tenerife for irregularities in barracks works

The investigation that has led to the imputation of Vázquez Jarava for the crimes of influence peddling, administrative prevarication, bribery, document falsification and embezzlement has put 193 contracts under suspicion, mainly painting and waterproofing for a value of 3.3 million euros awarded between 2014 and 2019. The investigations indicate that in a set of these works, in which 99,173 euros were invested, there was a diversion of 79,938 euros, 80% of its value.

The Civil Guard reports place the Canarian builder Ángel Ramón Tejera de León, alias

, who was awarded the contracts through various companies domiciled in the archipelago, as a key piece of the fraud.

This businessman is also cited in the summary of the

for his participation in a meeting of several of those involved in this other plot, although investigation sources for now rule out a connection between the two cases.

Tejera de León acknowledged in her judicial statement her personal relationship with the general and other high-ranking officers of the force, whom she allegedly entertained with hotel stays, trips and tickets to watch Real Madrid soccer matches.

He also admitted that sometimes he did not do the jobs he was contracted for in the barracks, although he assured that he compensated them in other awards.

A second businessman, whose data the Canarian businessman used to make invoices, is also charged.

The investigations that have uncovered the alleged corruption of General Vázquez Jarava began in May 2018, after the Secretary of State for Security, of the Ministry of the Interior, received an anonymous letter denouncing alleged irregularities in construction works contracts. the Command of the Civil Guard in Ávila.

That accusation was forwarded to the Internal Affairs Service, responsible for investigating the alleged crimes committed by the agents of the armed institute.

The first investigations, which included a report from the inspector of the Civil Guard in Castilla y León, have already revealed alleged irregularities in three works carried out, between April 2015 and November 2017, in two separate barracks in the province.

Specifically, those referring to the rehabilitation of the façade and a courtyard of the barracks in Navarredonda de Gredos, where only 50% of the paid work had been carried out;

the rehabilitation and changes of blinds in Hoyo de Pinar, where it was not recorded that 12% of the work had actually been done;

and in the conditioning of the dependencies in Arévalo, in which there was no record of works worth more than 10,000 euros.

The companies that had obtained those contracts were Angrasurcor, Solocorcho and Canarycork, three merchants based in the Canary Islands that, when the works were carried out, had Tejera de León as administrator.

The head of the Civil Guard in Ávila, Lieutenant Colonel Alonso, was accused of having validated the payment of those invoices with his signature,

Given the indications, Internal Affairs brought the facts to the attention of a court in Ávila in January 2019. Shortly after, it was inhibited in the Investigating Court 3 of Madrid when verifying that the alleged irregularities were not limited exclusively to the Castilian province and Leonese, but that they included other communities and that, in addition, the main person involved was the general, whose destination when the events occurred was in the General Directorate of the Civil Guard, in the capital.

By then, the investigation had spread both in time (the period of the investigations was extended from 2014 to 2019) and in space, reaching, in addition to the province of Ávila, Civil Guard barracks in the Albacete headquarters, Algeciras, Alicante, Badajoz, Castellón, Huelva, Jaén, A Coruña, Tenerife, Toledo, Murcia and Valladolid.

The investigations indicate that, at least, in five of them - Ávila, Castellón, Alicante, A Coruña and Albacete - the general allegedly used the same maneuver to rig the contracts.

According to reports present in the case, Vázquez Jarava proceeded from his position as Deputy Director General of Support to the "decentralization of credit" (which meant that the commanderies had autonomy to award minor contracts) and, later, he indicated to those responsible that contract with companies from Tejera de León.

Those responsible for the Civil Guard areas in Extremadura, Valencia, Albacete and A Coruña have confirmed that they suffered from this

.

After his accusation on January 14, 2022, Vázquez Jarava testified before the judge three months later.

The Civil Guard is now analyzing the tax data, financial assets and bank movements, both of him and of a company in his name, in search of indications of his alleged irregularities.

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