Officers from the Guardia Civil have arrested a lawyer at his office. He is under investigation for allegedly falsifying documents, committing fraud, and being unprofessional in his work for the Torrevieja City Council. For decades, the lawyer AM has worked with the City Council’s outside legal services.
Months of investigation
Torrevieja’s Investigative Court Number 2 arrested the person after months of looking into a complaint that described the events, mainly the missing legal fees that were supposed to be deposited into city accounts but never made it there.
Court costs are the costs of going through the court system. These include attorney and solicitor fees, as well as expert fees, fees for notifications, and other charges.
After being imprisoned for a day at the Torrevieja post barracks, the detainee was taken to court after a search of his office by a large number of Guardia Civil personnel.
According to sources from the High Court of Justice of the Valencian Community (TSJCV), Judge Juana López Hoyos, the head judge of the Torrevieja courts, ordered the release of the detainee after he made a statement. He was also told to appear in court every two weeks, have his bank account frozen, and have his car seized.
Number of the account
The investigation is mostly about finding out if this professional used his own bank account information instead of the City Hall account information while asking the court for these payments. A few years ago, lawyers and solicitors could make these fees directly to the court. But now they have to go via the local government first. The government pays for the service with public money and then sends it to the providers it has hired to do the legal work.
The overall amount of the alleged embezzlement is not known, but it could be several thousand euros. The case is focused on 2024 since that is when the proceedings were settled, but they started years previously.
More of it
The City Council’s legal fees, which were substantially greater than usual, were not paid, which was an irregularity that the municipal economic department was waiting for. In this example, the claimed embezzlement didn’t happen when it was found out, but that’s when the incident was reported.
The probe is said to have started years ago, but thus far, these facts have just been confirmed for the 2024 fiscal year. Not only did the suspect change the account number for the deposit, but they also pretended to be lawyers who worked for the municipal legal services on the account.
People who have worked with this firm for decades in the courts and municipal government in Torrevieja are shocked that they were able to arrest the professional.
Disloyalty in the workplace
In April of last year, the City Council signed a small emergency contract for legal representation services. The Director of the Legal Department said that processing it through direct award was necessary because the procedural representation for some cases needed to change “due to the sudden end of the professional relationship maintained until then with the solicitor who had occasionally provided services to this City Council due to alleged professional disloyalty.”
A strange element in the wording employed by the government to handle public contracts. In the realm of judicial activity, professional disloyalty is a crime established in the Criminal Code. It punishes a lawyer or solicitor’s conduct that clearly hurt their client, such as when they are grossly negligent or malicious in their work.
Author: Derek Appleton
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