The order of the Court of Instruction Nº4 of Ibiza which ruled the provisional dismissal of the president of the Consell Insular, Vicent Marí, after determining that he did not commit any crime of prevarication, influence peddling and coercion in the case of La Vida Islados, has uncovered an accumulation of recordings made by the then deputy auditor and current auditor of the institution, María Ana Tur Díaz.
According to the judicial document in possession of La Voz de Ibiza, in the instruction have been analyzed “many conversations provided by Tur Díaz, with different members of the Consell”. For four years, Tur Díaz has compulsively accumulated audios of politicians, colleagues, enemies, superiors and subordinates, in a sort of reversal of the case of José Manuel Villarejo Pérez, former commissioner of the National Police Corps. It is estimated that Villarejo made more than a hundred recordings of private conversations with high-ranking politicians from different political parties in the country, judges, journalists and businessmen in Spain during 2005 and 2017. At least about 80 conversations were leaked to the press from 2015 onwards.
The ‘Villarejo’ of Ibiza
The official of the Consell de Ibiza, appointed as comptroller since July 2022, has provided a significant number of conversations and audios “recorded by herself to people with whom she worked in the Consell” from November 2019 until at least May 2023, on which the judge has set his sights during the instruction. According to the order, Tur Díaz “for four years recorded colleagues, colleagues, superiors, inferiors, without them knowing it, without her telling them, and in areas and conversations in their offices and offices.” In addition to the island president, she also recorded the councilors María Fajarnés and Salvador Losa and the head of the Service of Arbitarje of the Consell and former island director of the State Administration, Agustín Goerlich, the lawyers Antoni Riera Buforn and María Torres and the head of the service of the Presidency Concepción Rebollo” and many others, before denouncing and even after having gone to the Prosecutor’s Office,” details the order. The judge warns that “it seems obvious that whoever has such profuse recordings of so many people has an evident power over these people, who cannot remember well what they said that day or the other, or if they were more or less fortunate in a private discussion. And they do not know who else may have listened to these conversations or how they will be used in the future”. In addition, the judicial document states that “the recordings of Mrs. Tur Díaz to Mr. Marí Torres should be evaluated with caution regarding the role of the person who records (who knows that he is being recorded) and who has in his hands the power that gives him to guide a conversation, to bring up one topic or another, to say this or that thing. But the truth is that they are very interesting to understand in real time the behavior and mood of those who are being recorded without knowing it”. In this sense, the judge concludes that “in all those audios (from November 2019 until at least May 2023) there are no behaviors attributable to (Vicent) Marí Torres that can be understood as violent pressure or attack against freedom, nor is there a single shout or insulting or humiliating term”. It also states that “there was a channel of communication, the terms are polite and respectful, and the two positions were confronted in dialogue, argumentatively. The tone used by Marí Torres is always close and reasonable. In fact, the deputy comptroller could freely express her position by exercising her powers in the repair”.
“Distrust and disloyalty.”
One of the people who was recorded has assured La Voz de Ibiza that she found out about it during the witness test in which she participated.
As he explained to La Voz de Ibiza, this generated a “bad feeling and a climate of absolute distrust and disloyalty”, although the information was not disseminated by the Consell until the court order became known this week.
Details of the recordings
The 32-page court order only refers to some conversations that the then deputy comptroller had with the president of the Consell de Ibiza. Regarding the differences they had on whether the contracting should be carried out via emergency, Marí Torres states: “The contracting should be carried out via emergency.
I mean that, if you have to report this, report it as you think you have to report it, I do not get involved, I will always consider that it is an emergency and we are still living in an emergency, a state of alarm that has left us all in check. Now, if you consider that it is not, I am not going to do it, on the contrary, I am not going to do it, I have never done it with anyone. I have my arguments and I will defend them because I believe that the situation is what it is and unfortunately we have had to manage it, this would not have been done in a normal year, it is as clear as day, but this year I have done it this way and I would do it this way again, if we lived through something, I mean that I am absolutely convinced of what we have done, and I repeat, here neither the island director, nor the tourism department, nor anyone else’s department, the only one who is absolutely responsible and the one who will stand up for all this will be me, solely and exclusively, and I will defend the work and the involvement of all those who have worked and are working on this dossier. “.
In another conversation, the president of the Consell de Ibiza asks him: “We may have differences of criteria, you may think white and I may think black, but as it is a criterion we will discuss it and sometimes I will be right, and sometimes you will be right. But I like to discuss things and not to have a unique vision of things, I am the first one to change my opinion when I am convinced with arguments or whatever. Why? Because I believe that listening is enriching (…) I say this for future occasions, so that the files are clean, I do not want there to be bad feelings from the secretary or bad feelings from the head of Human Resources, again it will be Legal Services, I do not want these battles and when there are discrepancies we sit down civilly and talk about it, so that we all go hand in hand, we are not enemies of each other here. “.
