Judge Pilar Alfonso Rodríguez of Magistrates Court Number 2 in Huércal-Overa (Almería) yesterday ordered the release, on bail, of the mayor of Zurgena, Cándido Trabalón, who was arrested last Wednesday in connection with city planning violations.
The mayor, along with the Councillor for Urbanism, Manuel Tijeras, building promoters Antonio López and Tomás Zurano and the architects Francisco Salvador and Carlos Berbel, were detained on Wednesday as part of ‘operación costurero’, an investigation into the illegal construction of some 1,000 houses in the area.
The investigation has been ongoing for a long time now and It all relates to the Council decision to redesignate municipal land as urbanisable and the subsequent building of around 1,000 houses. Some of the construction work has been temporarily halted until the end of judicial proceedings. It is a question of whether graft and corruption was involved and who benefited financially from all these dealings.
The mayor, of course, denies the charges and believes the whole thing to be a ‘political plot’.