The alleged ringleader of the Mediator case, former PSOE deputy for Las Palmas Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo, received businessman Maximiliano Poveda Sierra, the third largest defaulter in Spain, who owed in that date to the public treasury taxes for 23.55 million euros.
As La Provincia has advanced and EFE has corroborated in the summary documents, on the 7th the Police informed the judge of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in charge of the case that, following the trail of the operations with the plot of Raúl Gómez Rojo , one of the accused businessmen, found conversations and graphic materials that led him to investigate Maximiliano Poveda Sierra.
The agents responsible for the case were interested in documenting the payments that Poveda Sierra had supposedly made to members of the plot, according to what they state in several of the recordings that are part of the summary, but he acknowledges that “until now no evidence of the same in the bank accounts of those investigated” and that the tracking “is more complicated if possible” because the companies of the Madrid businessman are based abroad.
But there is reliable evidence that Poveda Sierra met Fuentes Curbelo when he was a deputy: there is a photo of the two posing, together with a third person, in front of the Socialist Parliamentary Group poster and it is dated April 21, 2021 .
On that date, Fuentes Curbelo was deputy spokesperson for the PSOE in the Finance Commission, details his biography in Congress. From that position, the deputy for Las Palmas had participated as a speaker on behalf of the socialist group in the processing of various tax regulations, such as the Law on Measures to Prevent and Fight Tax Fraud (May 2021) or the reform that modified the Corporate Tax and Income Tax for non-residents (from October to December 2021).
According to the data on defaulters at the end of 2021 published by the Tax Agency, the businessman whom Fuentes Curbelo received in Congress was on that date the third largest defaulter of the Treasury in Spain among natural persons. Above him, there were only Agustín and Ramón Olivares Garrigós, both with 36.84 million; the rest of the largest debtors are mercantile companies.
What did Poveda Sierra want from the socialist deputy? According to the police report with the summary of his investigation, he wanted it to “pave the way for holding concerts in the Canary Islands for the installation of tanks” of oil or derivatives.
The same day of that meeting in Congress, the intermediary that gives its name to the case, Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, sends photographs of various prostitutes to Fuentes Curbelo and Gómez Rojo, the accused businessman who had mediated to contact Poveda Sierra, the Police said, that emphasizes that from that night there are photos in the cause of the socialist deputy in a hotel “with a woman of company”.
However, the Madrid businessman did not like the offer at all, or at least that is how Jesús María Pérez Spínola, another of the people who mediated in the meeting, conveyed it: “Maxi doesn’t like whores, damn it”, “So, no “, “He did not like the subject at all”, say several messages sent by him to the mediator.
In all these efforts, the defendant Gómez Rojo was seeking help to open a company on the islands that was included in the Canary Islands Special Zone (the low taxation instrument) and access awards from it, if possible setting up “a temporary union of companies that include a prestigious company and a local one”.
And once the award has been made, “the politicians receive their squid sandwich or whatever they have to receive,” he added in a conversation with Navarro Tacoronte recorded on April 27, 2021 and included in the same police report for the judge in charge of the case. The following day, Gómez Rojo met Fuentes Curbelo in Congress, in a meeting that they also recorded by taking a picture before the poster of the PSOE parliamentary group.
The Police report that, on those dates, “the organization is reaching its decline, at least with the participation of Navarro Tacoronte as an intermediary” because “many businessmen upset that what was promised by the plot has not been fulfilled begin to transfer their complaints directly to the dome.”
And, at that moment, the mediator begins to warn his interlocutors that he has recorded everything they have been talking about and that he can show it to other people: “Look, Raúl”, he tells Gómez Rojo, “all the conversations that you have had, both you and Jesús (María Pérez Spínola), with people from the Canary Islands, as well as with people from Valencia, I have all the recordings. Okay?”
From there, the conversation continues by resuming the party that followed the meeting between Fuentes Curbelo and Maximiliano Poveda on April 21, because Gómez Rojo reproaches the mediator that the expense cost the Madrid businessman “11,000 euros.”
