Espinosa assured that his relationship was with the “mediator”: “I did not know Fuentes Curbelo nor do I know him”
MADRID, 2 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The General of the Civil Guard Francisco Espinosa indicated in his statement before the examining magistrate of the ‘Mediator case’ on February 16 that he met the investigated Marcos Antonio Navarro Tacoronte by chance in a restaurant, and that in a first meeting he offered him a position as director of institutional relations in a company that he wanted to set up in the Canary Islands together with the businessman Antonio Bautista -also accused-. “The working conditions were 5,000 euros and a protocol expense card,” he said.
This was explained in his statement before the instructor, whose recording Europa Press has had access to, in which he asserted that he was offered that position because he knows “many people” from when he was stationed in Las Palmas for four years. In addition, the general pointed out, to questions from the judge, that he seemed “perfect.”
Judge Ángeles Lorenzo-Cáceres at that point asked him, surprised if he did not find this offer strange, which came from two people he hardly knew, and the general replied that he did not want to go home in retirement and that possibility just appeared. “They tell me that when I retire they can offer me that possibility, I didn’t want to go home in retirement and I grabbed that first circumstance. Then it didn’t materialize at all,” he recalled.
Previously, at the beginning of the interrogation, he indicated that the chance meeting with the “mediator” was while he was smoking outside a restaurant, and that after engaging in a conversation, telephone numbers were exchanged. Navarro Tacoronte explained that he traveled to Madrid two or three times a month “because he worked with a deputy.” Asked if it was then that Espinosa met the former PSOE deputy involved in the Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo case, the general answered emphatically that he was not: “I did not know him, nor do I know him now either.”
