The instructor of the Mediator case has asked the president of the Congress of Deputies, Meritxell Batet, to provide the mobile devices and other documentation that is in the office of Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo, alias Tito Berni, until a few days ago a socialist deputy dotted with a plot of corruption and currently at large.
Fuentes Curbelo, who was forced by the PSOE to hand over his deputy certificate after the scandal became known, had an official mobile phone, as well as a computer in Congress. The Police had asked the judge to access these devices as they were essential for the investigation and to be able to corroborate a series of conversations saved on the phone.
In a resolution, the magistrate defends that this claim to Congress is proportionate, necessary and suitable “since there are a series of sources of evidence that cannot be accessed through alternative procedures that do not imply temporary interference in the fundamental rights of the person under investigation. “.
As he recounts, the entire investigation revealed that the address pending registration “is the distribution center for narcotic substances, where experience shows that other amounts of narcotic substances can be found. In addition to drugs, it is characteristic that in these homes, cash from drug trafficking is found, together with effects or instruments of this illegal activity, impossible to seize without entering and searching the home”.
However, the judge cannot order a search in her office when she is inside the Congress of Deputies because the courts are “inviolable” so the magistrate has left her predisposition to collaborate with justice in the hands of the president of the body.
In a car, he requests that he “provide authorization and collaboration so that the Technical Secretariat deliver to the National Police, a group of Technological crimes, the effects deposited inside the office of the Congress of Deputies assigned to the investigated Fuentes Curbelo to carry out his work Parliamentarians”.
In the same resolution, the instructor points out that in the event that the presidency of Congress collaborates by delivering said devices, “it is agreed that the National Police proceed to open, analyze, study and prepare the corresponding expert report of all computer equipment and other devices or digital and analog storage media, as well as the data that is available through these, either electronically or stored in digital or physical files, equipment and computer media.
The head of the Investigating Court number 4 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife explains that this former deputy is considered the “leader of the political branch of a criminal organization” dedicated to obtaining bribes, through cash, transfers, trips, meals, dinners and parties, in exchange for favoring businessmen with awards and review of files.
And for this reason, given the “modus operandi and the structure” of the plot, the magistrate sees access to Tito Berni’s office located in Congress as “maximum relevance” and more specifically for the purposes of ownership and use of the person investigated.
On February 14, when the arrests in the Mediator case were made in the Canary Islands, the socialist group forced deputy Fuentes Curbelo to present his resignation as parliamentarian. According to socialist sources, that same day the former deputy left his office after collecting some belongings. At that time the group closed the office, which has not been occupied by another politician.
The Congress of Deputies gives their lordships a mobile phone and a tablet in each legislature. The Presidency of the Congress of Deputies already assured last week that it would be in favor of facilitating the inspection of the office if the judicial authority requested it.
The judge in the Mediator case investigates an alleged corrupt network that operated by attracting businessmen from the livestock and agricultural sector of the Canary Islands who were promised to obtain “privileges” in exchange for an initial toll of 5,000 “pens”, such as the ringleaders of the plot called for money. The alleged extortion suffered by some island businessmen who were threatened with inspections or leaving them outside of European aid if they did not pay bribes is also being investigated.
On the one hand, there is the political plot, headed by the former Socialist deputy and his nephew, and on the other, the business plot, at the top of which would be the former Major General of the Civil Guard, Francisco Espinosa Navas. Currently the latter is the only one of those investigated who is in pretrial detention. The facts that are being investigated are limited to the years 2020 and 2021. They are being investigated for a string of crimes ranging from bribery to money laundering, including counterfeiting, influence peddling and belonging to a criminal organization.
