The prosecution was able have knowledge already in 2017 of alleged irregularities in the contracting of works of reform and repair of Civil Guard barracks, but the sending to the public ministry of a report with data on this matter, issued by the armed institute itselfwas stopped by the then deputy director general head of the Corps Support Command, the Lieutenant General Pedro Vázquez Jaravasources close to the investigation of the Cuarteles case confirm to this newspaper.
“It is not necessary to notify the Prosecutor’s Office,” said Jarava, who today is the main of the four defendants in this case, of which this newspaper has been reporting. This first notice to the prosecutor ended up filed in the drawers of the Ministry of the Interior at the time.
On April 18, 2017, the then deputy operational director (DAO) of the Civil Guard, the Lieutenant General Pablo Martin Alonso, received an extensive letter entitled “Draft Prosecutor Report”. The dossier had been drawn up by agents of the Security Service. Internal Affairs of the Civil Guardafter investigating a first batch of information of anonymous origin that reached that service in 2016. That year is precisely the period in which the billing of the Canarian businessman Ángel Ramón Tejera with the Civil Guard, work is triggered today under suspicion until it is multiplied by three compared to the average of previous years.
Internal Affairs delivered the report, in quadruplicate, to the DAO on April 18, 2017. Its content dealt with the striking increase in contracts awarded by various and dispersed Civil Guard units, most of them non-Canary Islands, to the same businessman. The authors of the report They already pointed to possible crimes in that succession of contracts, but Lieutenant General Jarava was not yet the target of his inquiries.
“Don’t Send It”
Martin Alonso gave one of the copies to Jarava, to ask the Support Command for their opinion. The following month, May 2017, Jarava sent a response to the DAO in which he maintains: “By understanding that in the actions reported there is no evidence of crimeit is not necessary to forward the report of the Internal Affairs Service to the Prosecutor’s Office.” According to sources related to the Cuarteles case, Jarava supported this refusal in the responses he obtained from various heads of command posts and barracks.
On December 27, 2017, the report was definitively stopped when the Director General of the Civil Guard at the time, José Manuel Holgado – a man of maximum confidence of the then Minister of the Interior, Juan Ignacio Zoido– gave in writing order, by resolution, to Internal Affairs to file the matter and end their investigations. The sources consulted do not know of precedents for a director general to give this type of instruction to Internal Affairs. Jarava had already ceased his duties as deputy director general of the Benemérita, in a retirement pass that would appear in the BOE two weeks later.
From February 11 to December 13, 2016, the builder Mon Tejera had received 80 payments from the Civil Guard, in firm or in the form of “Fixed Cash Advance”, provided for in the Service’s works contracting procedure of Quartering of the armed institute. The 80 orders were carried out -according to Internal Affairs after designation of the builder by Jarava himself- in barracks of the Algeciras, Alicante, Ávila, Badajoz, Castellón, Jaén, Santa Cruz de Tenerife and other dependents of the Murcia area. and the Headquarters of Economic Affairs of the Corps. That jumble of payments would remain unscrutinized for another half year, until another later anonymous letter arrived, in May 2018, at Internal Affairs from the Secretary of State for Security.
The opinion that was decisive then to stop the investigations was that of a general pampered by the previous minister, Jorge Fernandez Diaz. On April 28, 2012, Jarava -promoted to Brigadier General in June 2008, in times of Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba in Interior – had been promoted by Fernández Díaz and his colleague in Defense, Pedro Morenesto General of Division.
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On December 14, 2012, the same tandem of ministers had promoted him to lieutenant general… in less than eight months. It was unprecedented speed until then in a corps in which, because there are only five positions, a Division General can wait years to reach the three stars of Lieutenant General.
In a report submitted to the examining magistrate 2 of Ávila on January 24, 2020, the Civil Guard Internal Affairs agents say that in 2016 “there is an exponential increase in the amounts invoiced”. By then, the armed institute, already under the direction of Felix Azonhad taken Jarava to court for the alleged commission of five crimes: bribery, embezzlement, administrative prevarication, documentary falsification and influence peddling.