The judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón has prosecuted 42 people for the Acuamed case, the investigation into this public company for the allegedly irregular awarding and execution of twenty hydraulic and environmental works in the Mediterranean basin.
The magistrate considers that the facts are constitutive of the crimes of corruption in business, documentary falsification, fraud against the administration, prevarication, embezzlement of public funds and bribery.
The judge considers that the irregularities committed in each of the contracts with the aim of favoring certain contractors, as stated in its report by the Prosecutor’s Office, have been accredited. According to the order, in exchange for the awards, some of the defendants received different gifts. In the case of the main person investigated, the former general director of Acuamed Arcadio Mateo, the judge points out that he obtained trips and stays inside and outside Spain from the contracting companies and even a hair implant in Turkey worth 4,500 euros.
In some of these contracts, the intervention of the communications reveals that Acuamed acted outside the technical criteria that should guide the performance of the public company. For example, the contractor’s work was facilitated by allowing him to intervene in the drafting of the reports that Acuamed had to issue, varying for this the concepts and amounts to be included in the settlement of the works and in the claim at the convenience of the same until reaching the minimum that would have been agreed, regardless of the reality of the work.
The order emphasizes that two officials from the public company submitted documents to various instances of the Ministry and Acuamed reporting the serious irregularities detected. This was done by the then Director of Engineering and Construction until 2014, Francisco Valiente, and later by Gracia Ballesteros, Territorial Manager.
“As with any response, the first was not attended to and was dismissed, and the Chief Coordinator State Attorney of the Direct Management Agreement signed with Acuamed was removed from his study, as he himself declared, hiring some external advisers”, says the judge. Gracia Ballesteros was also removed from her post.
The order also states that on June 14, 2012, the financing credit contract was signed between the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Ministry of Agriculture and the Environment for an amount of up to 500 million, requested by Acuamed to cover its own costs. of activity in relation to the construction of different hydraulic infrastructures such as dams, desalination plants, ponds or pipelines.
Before signing the loan contract, Arcadio Mateo decided “unilaterally” to invest the public capital received from the loan requested by Acuamed, placing it in various banking entities and hiring an advisor to collaborate with him in these activities.
“In this way, Arcadio Mateo del Puerto, exceeding the functions assigned to him, and with the support of Francisco López Berrocal, would have carried out speculative activities with the money from the BEI loan, forming a long-term investment portfolio of state securities in entities such as BBVA, Santander, Unicaja and Caja Laboral, an activity that is far from ACUAMED’s corporate purpose, ignoring the warnings that came from the General Directorate of State Assets (DGPE)”, he concludes.
Among the works that have been investigated in the years that the investigation of the case has lasted -since 2016- are the water supply system from the Cerro Colorado reservoir to the Guadalentín valley (Murcia); the construction project of the complementary works of the desalination plant of Campo Dalias, Balsas del Cañuelo and La Redonda (Almería); the amended project file for flood control and lamination works in the middle basin of the Serpis river (Valencia); the contract for drafting the project, execution of the works and operation and maintenance of the desalination plant in Torrevieja (Alicante) or the works to eliminate chemical contamination in the Flix reservoir (Tarragona).
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