The criminal trial against the former leadership of Gent per Formentera (GxF) for rigging the appointment of firefighters collaborators of the Consell Insular with the aim of favoring the son of the current councilor of the insular formation and member of the Ethics Code Commission, José Marí Mayans, already has a date: the sessions will take place on 28, 29 and 30 April 2025 at 9.30 am in the Provincial Court Section No. 1 in Palma.
As a result, they will have to sit in the dock:
- Jaume Ferrer Ribas, the former president of the Consell Insular.
- Sonia Cardona Ferrer, former first vice-president and councilor of Culture, Education and Heritage at the time of the events, who is the current secretary general of GxF, whose family is also the owner of El Caminito, which benefited from a controversial express license with irregularities.
- Silvia Tur Ribasformer Minister of Environment, Industry and Energy, who was also a member of the Parliament and who lost the last elections to the candidacy headed by the still president, Llorenç Córdoba.
- Isidor Torres Mayans, former manager of the Consell de Formentera accused at the time of hiring the architectural firm of his brother-in-law for the preparation of two urban planning reports on La Savina and Sant Ferran. He is the son of former mayor Isidor Torres.
The first three will sit in the dock for alleged direct civil liability for crimes of prevarication, while Torres Mayans will be held accountable for the crime of administrative prevarication and false documentation.
The Chamber will be formed by the president Jaime Tártalo Hernández and the magistrates Samantha Romero Adán and Gloria Martín Fonseca. This step has been taken almost a year after the Instruction Court No. 3 of Ibiza, in charge of Judge Carmen Martín Romero, issued the order for the opening of the oral trial on September 22, 2022.
What the complaint is about
The firefighter Rubén Castellar Lozalo accused them of having deliberately failed to meet the requirements to fill five positions of collaborating firefighter, published in the Internal Regulations of the Fire and Rescue Service of the Consell Insular de Formentera in the BOIB of September 3, 2011. The complainant had been in seventh place on the first list to complete the five positions offered and, the rigging arranged between the defendants to favor the applicant Carlos Marí Mayans prevented him from occupying that function, so he began with his legal claims, first in the administrative route and after winning, in the criminal. Carlos Marí Mayans is the son of the current GxF councilor, José Marí Mayans, who is also a member of the Code of Ethics and Good Governance Commission that issued a biased report that both his political group and the PSOE used to promote and justify the motion of censure against the president of the Consell, Llorenç Córdoba. In 2012, when the irregular appointment of his son took place, the GxF councilor was director of the La Caixa office in Sant Francesc Xavier. At the time of his appointment, Marí Mayans did not have driving license C, an exclusionary requirement established by the Regulation. Nor could he process it in four months as established by the regulations published in the BOIB, taking into account that he was 19 years old and to access that category of driving license it is necessary to be older than 21. Thus, the Contentious Administrative Court No. 2 of Palma de Mallorca on March 20, 2017 declared null the appointments of the two applicants who lacked the legal requirements and recognized Castellar the status of “collaborating firefighter since January 2013 (date on which he should have effectively been called as a worker)”. In addition to a compensation of 80,199 euros. In the ruling, testimony of the proceedings was deducted and sent to the Public Prosecutor’s Office “for the possible commission of criminal acts in view of the admission of applicants and subsequent hiring lacking the requirements to do so, as well as, specifically, regarding the unjustified suspension of the appointment for more than a year resulting in the hiring of Carlos Marí Mayans“. Castellar filed a complaint for this situation, which prevented its archiving, generating the criminal investigation for the irregularities that will take the former leadership of Gent per Formentera again to the dock.
On the bench again
Ferrer and Cardona, together with Bartomeu Escandell and Josep Mayans, have already had to render accounts before the Court of Instruction number 4 of Ibiza for the Punta Prima caseThe case was brought by a German businessman responsible for the developer of the tourist complex Sunway S.L. in the area of Punta Prima, after the government team of Formentera decided to change the qualification of part of its land, where the second phase of the project was to be built. All of them were accused of the crimes of administrative prevarication, disobedience, falsehood, infidelity in the custody of documents and coercion. In the trial, Ferrer and Escandell were acquitted, while the charges against Cardona and Mayans were dropped.
