Valga is a town of 6,000 inland in the province of Pontevedra, where a 73-year-old PP mayor has ruled with an absolute majority since 1991. The bonuses questioned by the Consello de Contas in a recent report between 2017 and 2021 even benefited the officials responsible for ensuring legality in the consistory, i.e. the municipal secretary and the auditor. The Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Auditors is investigating the 20,000 euros pocketed by each of these public servants. “They are great professionals,” defends the popular Bello Maneiro. In 20 years, the city council and its councilors have paid out more than 300,000 euros for meetings whose celebration and purpose they controlled themselves. They asked for another decade, but it is not known how much. And they have already announced that they will not stop doing this. “We are very clear that it is legal,” emphasizes the mayor of Valga.
It all started in Olympic Spain in 1992. Bello Maneiro, who is now running for re-election, made his debut as mayor of Valga for an independent party after being a member of Manuel Fraga’s Alianza Popular. In the same year he organized some meetings with his council members outside of the formalities of the city council. Members of the local executive branch began paying allowances for attending these meetings, a parallel commission with no official constitution or specified functions apart from the rest of the government bodies, which were under the control of the opposition or officials. Payments were ordered by mayoral decree, explains the Consello de Contas. They were denounced by the opposition in 2016 and investigated for alleged subterfuge and embezzlement. But the judges saw no crime and filed them in 2019.
In June 2017, with the judicial investigation still ongoing, the mayor decided to care a little about the appearance of those who remained with his team and officially approved its establishment as a coordinating commission. The report of the Galician Court of Accounts concludes that from 1991 to that date “both the meetings and the perception of attendance fees” were carried out “without the regulatory support required by law”, but adds that in the following years and up to Today irregularities have persisted.
For example, the commission “violates the legal requirement that a civil servant must act as secretary” and its duties are not defined. This last deficiency “makes it impossible to determine” whether their work justifies participants receiving allowances, explains the Galician regulator, which recognizes an “obvious weakness in internal control”. His allegations are similar to those made by the Association of Clerks and Comptrollers of Local Government (Cosital) more than five years ago when investigating the criminal complaint that was eventually filed. Cosital’s Pontevedra delegation is confirmed in this criticism after the irregularities pointed out by the Consello de Contas: “The legality of the collection of this assistance depends on the regularity of all these aspects.”
The mayor of Valga and his councilors have raked in more than 300,000 euros with these allowances in 20 of the 30 years they have been asking for them. No information is available for the remaining decade. The regulator put the compensation paid between 2017 and 2021 at 87,000 euros, reaching 215,000 euros between 2003 and 2016, according to the report sent by the city council to the court that investigated the case and to which these newspaper had access. What they collected between 1992 and 2003 is a mystery, as no official records were found in the city archives, the council admitted before the judge at the time. A spokeswoman for the city council has confirmed that the commissions “will continue to be held” despite the complaint from the Court of Auditors. Citing the criminal investigation filed by the Pontevedra Provincial Court in 2019, the mayor urges the regulator to “correct its mistake”.
Not a single hit from the secretary and the controller
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The report of the Consello de Contas highlights that, since 2017, the payments to the Mayor and the Valga City Councils for participation in this parallel commission are no longer affected by the municipal intervention. It was precisely on these dates that the auditor José Juan Vidal Vilanova and secretary Juan Manuel Salguero del Valle. Both were appointed “by accumulation”, that is, they began to work in Valga for a few hours without ceasing to perform the same functions in their original consistories (Sanxenxo and Ribeira respectively). In return, his salary was increased by a legally stipulated “bonus of up to 30% of his fixed salary”. But it wasn’t the only climb.
The inspector signed a report justifying that he had to collect allowances himself. “It is necessary for me to travel to the Valga City Council at least once a week, which involves significant costs that must be covered,” he argued in his opinion collected by the Consello de Contas. So he and his partner Salguero began collecting allowances for living expenses and travel expenses, which the supervisory authority regards as illegal: “The current legal framework does not provide for the payment of allowances to cumulative civil servants.” The Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Court of Accounts issued a letter after the accounting opinion, estimating indications of accounting responsibility for these payments. It also suspects the diets received from the mayor of Catoira (Pontevedra), Alberto García (PSOE); the City Council of Vilasantar (A Coruña), Fernando Pérez (PP); and the former mayor of Trazo (A Coruña) José Dafonte, formerly in the PP.
View of the Town Hall of the Town Hall of Valga (Pontevedra). OSCAR CORRAL
Among the irregularities that led to the investigations of the Public Prosecutor’s Office of the Valga Court of Accounts is that the high officials charged the municipal coffers with lunches and dinners without having justified these long working hours and, in the case of the controller, the tolls of the highway without presenting the tickets. The Consello de Contas report lists double charges (expenditure on maintenance, locomotion and tolls twice on the same day) and statements of allowances “every month of the year” as if they had never taken vacation. In 2021, upon learning that local opposition had denounced the matter, both officials stopped demanding those compensations. In statements to this newspaper, the Valga inspector claims that they no longer requested them out of “caution”, not because they doubt their legality.
“They reserved the money there,” says the socialist spokeswoman in Valga, María Ferreirós. “If the Court of Auditors’ report had been favorable to them, they would end up billing it.” Ferreirós was the one who denounced the rain of the Valga diets before the Galician regulator. He says the mayor boasts that in his more than 30 years at the head of the command staff, there has not been a secretary or auditor who has objected to his decisions. “Can you be that perfect?” Ironically, the socialist mayor. Bello Maneiro, he continues, surrounded himself with secretaries and random interlopers without authorization for much of his long political career. “A random interloper got him on the electoral lists and he had a secretary who was the daughter of a builder who had contracts with the city council,” says Ferreirós.
The College of Auditors and Secretaries agrees with the Consello de Contas that the regulations in Galicia do not allow these civil servants with cumulative functions to collect daily allowances, but they ask the Xunta to regulate them. “The exercise of these compensations should not be illegal, and so we are taking action to change regional regulations to explicitly collect them,” the company says. For his part, the auditor Vidal Vilanova assures that there are “very many” cases of secretaries or auditors who, despite everything, receive these remunerations. “It is perfectly legal and appropriate and a common practice. I’ve been in the profession for 31 years and I’ve always received these allowances, ”he says of his time in Galician communities such as Rianxo, Porriño and Santiago. “It’s also a ridiculous amount,” he adds.
Neither Inspector Vidal nor Secretary Salguero are unknown officials. In 2018, En Marea brought the relations between the Valga City Council and the companies managed by Vidal before the prosecutor, but the case was filed. In 2014, the name Salguero was heard in some controversial police bugs between popular Xunta officials and the Santiago City Council in the Pokémon case. In these talks, the PP politicians maneuvered to get rid of the then municipal secretary of the Galician capital, whom they found awkward for the plans of the mayor, the popular Gerardo Conde Roa. They explained how they intended to force his replacement with Salguero. The latter did not last long in Santiago’s position and was eventually sacked after a judgment invalidated his appointment. Salguero did not respond to the newspaper’s offer to publish his version.
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