• The accusation: the immovable anti-corruption stance
  • Judgment: Judges 'save' politicians from garbage plot

Understanding the political class of Vega Baja (Alicante) in the last 20 years is impossible without the businessman Ángel Fenoll, a proper name in the south of the province. That illiterate boy who in the beginning pulled a car picking up trash, was the architect of politics in the area for decades, who was consulted about everything and who ended up sharing a table and tablecloth with the dome of local politics. Ángel Fenoll was an institution without glamor, the core of a major collusion around the garbage business.

He barely knows how to read or write and has serious difficulties in expressing himself. However, he knows how to use the recorder and that has been the end of many who did business with him not entirely clean. It is clear that he dies killing. Those conversations that he treacherously collected were the genesis of the 'Brugal case' and its multiple ramifications, nourished by 20 separate pieces. Despite the different parts in which the Justice has broken the issue, 'Brugal' becomes a plot of political and business interests around the waste. That is its essence.

Fenoll's luck changed in 2007. The police arrested him for the recordings that he had made himself, allegedly to later extort money from his political interlocutors. The Police presented him as the great achiever. Fenoll fell and the legal cases derived from the investigations of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (Udef) of the National Police Corps uncovered what for many was already an open secret and that later Anticorruption testified: that for years he was buying wills to that nobody should get their hands on their businesses and thus scare off any type of competition.

However, the Alicante Court has absolved him of the crimes of which he had been accused in this case - he has another one that is very similar due to the Zonal Plan for waste that affects the Alicante Provincial Council - by invalidating the telephone interventions that made it emerge. The magistrates do not enter to assess whether there was a crime.

The Prosecutor's Office has the option of appealing to the Supreme Court, something that it is evaluating and that it will do in all probability. But what happened for two decades in the Vega Baja? Who is Ángel Fenoll? What was your ability to influence?

The account of the events of the prosecutor Pablo Romero gave an account of how politics was understood at that time and of the power that the businessman had. The lawyer even paid the then mayor José Manuel Medina (PP) - who was facing 12 years in prison for a crime of fraud - in a matter in return, Anticorruption insists, to keep the waste concession. They were just over 40,000 euros from those of 1997.

If Fenoll has any characteristic - regardless of his peculiar way of expressing himself - it is that he does not marry anyone. This was the case when he distanced himself from Medina. The crack between the two came due to payments that the businessman demanded from the City Council and which were not satisfied. It was then that Fenoll changed sides and sided with Mónica Lorente - who has just been freed from eight years in prison -, who at the time was contesting the Mayor's Office for Medina. The prosecutor says that he had a lot to do with her promotion and that she thanked him. How? Making the concession of garbage untouchable for other businessmen. Fenoll breathed calmly. The waste was still his.

Its hegemony began in 1988 . That year he won the award by hand and never released it again. Since then, it never had competition. In 1991, it bought votes from people of the gypsy race to support the PP lists in the municipal elections of 1991. It gave 5,000 pesetas. Later, he was implicated in the embezzlement of 48,700 euros that had been donated by nuns to the City Council of Orihuela when Luis Fernando Cartagena - later Minister of Public Works of the Valencian Government and condemned for this matter - was mayor of the city.

Cartagena did not register the entry of that money and kept it on a piano.When Justice was on his heels, Cartagena resorted to him to make him invoices and thus make him believe that the money had been spent on remodeling official protection houses. Fenoll received a year in prison for that. His affinity with the PP is incontestable although throughout his career the businessman has helped others if he believed it convenient for his business. Thus, he met with the mayor of the Jesús Ferrández Liberal Center. As he did in all his meetings with businessmen and political leaders where, according to investigators, he negotiated with gifts and bribes the award of the garbage treatment service in Orihuela, he recorded that meeting with a hidden camera.

Ángel Fenoll also aspired to obtain the Zonal Plan of the Vega Baja and that is why he approached the then president of the Alicante Provincial Council, José Joaquín Ripoll . He wanted to expand his business and the politician gave him free rein, according to the judge who has sent them to the bench. It benefited him and Enrique Ortiz - the businessman who has just admitted that he corrupted the former mayor of Alicante Sonia Castedo in exchange for 'taking over' the General Plan of the city - with the award of the landfill.

Anti-corruption accuses them of bribery, prevarication, prohibited negotiation, fraud, coercion and influence peddling. The industrialist faces 17 years. In addition, he also faces six years for bribery and embezzlement of public funds and a 100,000 euros fine for the Calpe garbage case, where the former PP mayor, Francisco Javier Morató, appears, for whom the Prosecutor's Office asks for 14 years in prison for a continued crime of bribery, embezzlement of public funds, prevarication and money laundering.

The modus operandi is the same as in the Zonal Plan of the Vega Baja or in the Orihuela garbage. After all, Fenoll's story has always been burning between dumpsters and their allotments.

In accordance with the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • Alicante
  • Sonia castedo
  • UDEF
  • Enrique Ortiz
  • Brugal case
  • Events

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