The former mayor of Santa Pola, the Miguel Zaragoza of the PP, and the former councillor and deputy Loreto Cascales, along with the sister of the former mayor, Pilar Zaragoza and her partner, are amongst the defendants who will be on trial at the Alicante Provincial Court in Elche accused of the crime of prevarication, with the oral hearing now set to begin in January 2024.
In total, there are eight people standing trial, all of them are accused of alleged prevarication, bribery and prohibited negotiations for renting municipal offices to a private clinic in a municipal office in exchange for hiring relatives of PP militants. In some cases, like that of Pilar Zaragoza, they would have received salaries without going to work. Added to all this is that the clinic would not have paid the fee to the council for rent.
In addition to the former mayor, his sister and the two former councillors – Jorge Perello, who was responsible for Personnel and Loreto Cascales, mayor of Gran Alacant -, the then managers of the clinic Manuel Rodríguez Bernal and Fernando Gómez Soler, the former Sports Councillor Francisco Martín and Antonio Jesús Martínez. These last two, PP activists, had been hired at the clinic. In the investigation phase, the then owners of the clinic did admit that Pilar Zaragoza did not go to work for a year, despite the fact that she was paid in full, and that council staff also provided their services at the clinic.
It must be remembered that the case of the Gran Alacant Clinic was during a phase of the investigation, in 2018, in the Supreme Court due to the status of Loreto Cascales, who at that time was a deputy to the Congress of Deputies. The accused of Miguel Zaragoza, at that time, provincial deputy of Social Service, also caused his resignation, motu proprio, as he alleged at the time so as not to harm the PP.
And in addition to the hiring of people related to the PP in the clinic, there is also the case of the Gran Alacant Clinic not paying fees during the 10 years of rent, from 2006 to 2016, which amounted to 109,000 euro. Subsequently, the city council claimed it and a court ruled in favour of the clinic managers, as it only forced them to pay 13,022 euro for the personnel that the council had to provide to the clinic.
