The investigation of the ‘Mediator case’ owes its existence and its name to a Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte. Both for his role within the plot, as a link between politicians and businessmen, and, above all, for the more than 120 gigabytes of photos, videos and audios that he contributed from his phones and that constitute the backbone of the summary of the cause that has motivated the resignation of the socialist deputy Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo, and his nephew Taishet Fuentes, both arrested and accused of serious crimes of corruption. As elDiario.es has learned, the “Mediator” Navarro has a long criminal record that accumulates prison sentences for five different sentences. The most serious imposed seven and a half years in prison for stealing from various industries and gas stations as well as using false bank cards. Already then, in that case, Navarro Tacoronte tried unsuccessfully to get rid of the bench alleging that he was a National Police informer.
The influential Fuentes family and a general with thousands of euros in shoe boxes: the case that shakes the Canarian PSOE
Further
October 2003. El Matorral industrial estate, in the Canary Islands town of Puerto del Rosario, in Fuerteventura. Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, who is 28 years old at the time, uses a crowbar to force the entrance door of the Panrico industrial warehouse and, accessing through the offices, takes 3,000 euros from one of the desk drawers. A few days later, he gets hold of the keys and codes for the safe and the alarm for a gas station in the same town and steals another 39,000 euros.
In mid-November of that same year, while Navarro was distracting an employee, one of his cronies entered the Matutano offices in the Hundura industrial estate and stole 1,900 euros in addition to the bag of an employee whom he had shackled. A few months before, he was also investigated for a robbery in another industrial estate in Puerto del Rosario, but it could not be proven that he stole 6,241 euros from the safe at Bimbo’s offices. Nor that he acted in collusion with a National Police inspector tried and acquitted several times in cases of police setups.
These three robberies resulted in the most serious sentence for what two decades later would become the visible face of the ‘Mediator case’: seven and a half years in prison for robbery with force, robbery with intimidation and falsification of a commercial document in competition with another of scam This last crime comes because, in addition, the Justice found that he used 17 illegally duplicated credit cards to obtain 18,140 euros irregularly.
The Court of Las Palmas sentenced him in 2007 and, a year later, the criminal chamber of the Supreme Court confirmed his sentence. Navarro Tacoronte’s appeal failed after putting a main argument on the judges’ table: that he did everything out of fear of a National Police inspector, of whom he was “a confidant and executor of his decisions,” he said.
The Supreme did not buy his latest defense strategy. “It cannot be argued that he acted because of death threats from the aforementioned inspector, nor that all his criminal activities were due to his order and compulsion,” said the judges.
The allegation made by Navarro Tacoronte’s then lawyer leads to the police part of the case: several agents were tried and convicted in the first instance, with an inspector accused of colluding with a Mediator who was beginning to write his long criminal record. Finally they were acquitted and the alleged police plot surrounding Navarro Tacoronte remained unproven. The woman who had been sentenced along with him for forging credit cards was also pardoned in 2011.
Theft, scams and driving without a license
This case is not the only sentence that reflects the criminal history of Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte. He was also convicted in another case for falsifying public documents, in another for fraud, in one for family abandonment and in another for driving without a license. But this case whose content reveals elDiario.es about thefts and forged cards had a police branch. Along with the ‘Mediator’, an inspector and three police officers sat on the bench.
One of them was then head of the Puerto del Rosario National Police group and was accused not only of being in cahoots with Navarro Tacoronte in some of his robberies and scams, but also of having falsified statements and evidence in the arrest of several accused of robbery. . They attributed to them the possession of several ski masks, knives, knives and gloves that had actually been found in another search.
The Court of Las Palmas acquitted the police officers and sentenced the inspector to four years in prison for falsifying an official document. The sentence acquitted him of the rest of the charges and, therefore, of having been in cahoots with Navarro Tacoronte: “It has not been proven that the defendants agreed with the purpose of illegally benefiting from others, planning and executing thefts in establishments.”
Despite this acquittal, the “Mediator” tried to assert this alleged unproven relationship with the police command to seek his own judicial pardon. And the case did not end there. The documentation that this newspaper has been able to examine reveals that in 2008 the Supreme Court, in addition to declaring the conviction of Navarro Tacoronte final, ordered to repeat the process against this police officer for a judicial error: he was convicted of a crime, that of forgery, for the that he had not even been charged. Also because his indictment did not include the facts of which he was accused.
The Supreme Court harshly criticized both the judge who signed the order and the court that endorsed this procedure to convict him. “The defenselessness, then, was absolute, and also the position of the judges, not ensuring the purity of the procedure, and with compliance with the legal provisions.” Three years later the matter was tried again at the Court of Las Palmas and the police command was acquitted, in a sentence signed by Salvador Alba, a corrupt judge today imprisoned for conspiring against Victoria Rosell. The court made it clear that it believed that all the police officers involved had lied and, expressing its “regret”, denounced them for false testimony, acquitting the one who had been accused of collaborating with Navarro Tacoronte in the robberies.
Police mounting accusations
Two of these acquitted policemen returned to the bench in 2018, this time accused of endorsing a package of cocaine to some detainees in Puerto del Rosario, and for the second time they were acquitted. The events for which they were accused occurred in January 2004, dates on which they were also accused of falsifying another report and of collaborating with ‘the Mediator’ in his robberies. At first, that case had ended in conviction with the signature of Salvador Alba, but the Supreme Court annulled the resolution and ordered a repeat trial.
Almost a decade after breaking into various offices in Puerto del Rosario and stealing thousands of euros, Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte is once again under the magnifying glass of Justice, this time almost on his own initiative at the center of a plot of alleged corruption that has claimed the career of two socialist positions, the deputy whom the whole country already calls Tito Berny, which includes photos of the politician with alleged prostitutes and party companions consuming cocaine. How this common criminal, a regular at police stations, came to associate with a congressional deputy is what a Canarian court is now investigating. Initially, it was this mediator who handed over to the Police his two mobile phones with more than 100,000 photos, audios and videos that he had recorded over the years of his meetings with politicians and businessmen, in Madrid and in the Canary Islands. He did it when he was accused of defrauding the then sports director of the Cabildo de Tenerife through, precisely, his credit card making unauthorized purchases.
That cause was archived but gave rise to the opening of what is now known as the ‘Mediator case’ with a former PSOE deputy, Juan Bernardo Fuentes accused of charging 15,000 euros in exchange for other members of the plot favoring businessmen in their businesses in the Canary Islands. .
