The Secretary of State for Security, Rafael Pérez, has agreed this Wednesday to dismiss Colonel José María Tienda, head of the Civil Guard in Santa Cruz de Tenerife since 2017, due to “loss of confidence”, as confirmed to EL PAÍS by sources from the armed institute. The reason given by the Ministry of the Interior is the alleged involvement of the high command in the alleged irregularities in the award of maintenance works in various Civil Guard barracks that a Madrid court has been investigating since the end of 2021. In this case there are two Civil Guard commanders charged, among them reserve lieutenant general Pedro González Jarava, who was in charge of the General Support Subdirectorate of the armed institute when the events occurred.
In the withering decision of the Interior, the close relationship between the Store and the Canarian builder Ángel Tejera de León, alias Monimplicated in this same investigation and who, moreover, appears mentioned in several police reports of the mediator case for his relationship with various defendants, including the General of the Civil Guard Francisco Espinosa, the alleged ringleader of this corruption plot, as this newspaper has verified. The audios incorporated into this case have also revealed the close relationship between the now dismissed colonel and General Espinosa.
According to sources from the armed institute, the decision to dismiss the colonel was made at the request of the head of the Civil Guard in the Canary Islands, considering that the different news that related him to both cases of corruption were causing “the consequent discredit” for the institution. , in addition to the fact that “it disturbs the operation of the command and generates distrust towards its work, regardless of the criminal or administrative significance it may have (the colonel’s actions).”
These same sources highlight that in the investigation carried out by the Internal Affairs Service of the Civil Guard on the alleged irregularities in the awarding of painting and waterproofing works in facilities of the armed institute in 13 provinces between the years 2008 and 2019, it has revealed that the Command of Santa Cruz de Tenerife is one of those that tendered a greater number of the works under suspicion. A significant number of these contracts, both in the Canary Islands and in other provinces, fell precisely to two companies in which Tejera de León appears as sole administrator, Angrasurcor SL and Solocorcho SL
This constructor is also mentioned five times in the summary of the mediator casein which the alleged leaders are General Espinosa and former PSOE deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo, Tito Berni. In all of them it is in relation to a meeting that took place on November 4, 2020 at the Hotel Escuela de Tenerife. At that meeting, in addition to Tejera de León, the confessed intermediary of the plot, Antonio Navarro Tacoronte; the former general director of Livestock of the Canarian government, Taishet Fuentes, who is also the nephew of Fuentes Curbelo; General Espinosa and businessman Antonio Bautista Prado. The police reports relate the builder directly to the high command of the Civil Guard, which is the only one accused in the mediator case who has entered prison.
Navarro Tacoronte secretly recorded his meetings that day with his mobile phone, files now incorporated into the summary. Thus, while he goes to the meeting at the hotel with General Espinosa, he records how he receives a call from Colonel Tienda, the high command now dismissed, in which the general comments in a tone that denotes close trust between the two that he is ” half drunk” and that later they will speak with a third person whom they identify by his first name, Luis.
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As detailed in the police reports incorporated into the summary, the recording later includes the conversations held by the five participants in the meeting. At one point in it, Tejera de León boasts of having 17 houses facing the sea and that ex-president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was supposedly interested in acquiring the “biggest”.
