An official from the Alcudia City Council was arrested for registering foreigners.

PalmThe Civil Guard has arrested an official from the Alcudia City Council for allegedly registering foreigners, which would constitute a crime of falsification. The arrest took place this past Wednesday morning, according to information from the Armed Forces. This Thursday, he was brought before the Inca Court.

According to the Mayor of Alcudia, Fina Linares, a total of 438 fraudulent registrations have been recorded. All of these individuals were migrants who were in an irregular administrative situation. They were registered at non-existent addresses, on plots of land where no buildings existed, or in unfinished homes, as Linares stated in a press conference.

According to the City Council, all these individuals will begin to be removed from the register starting this Friday. "We have to deregister them all because it's impossible to verify that they live here. No one lives in the houses where they're registered, or there's no house. From then on, as a local government, we can't do anything," the mayor noted.

From November 2023

The arrested official, Linares explained, is from Alcudia and began working at the City Council as an interim in May 2023. He spent three months working from home in the Statistics department and then moved to Procurement.

It was from November 2023 that he allegedly began fraudulently registering foreign residents. He already had experience, because he had worked (legally) in another city council, the mayor said.

However, they had no suspicions until approximately two months ago, when a person came looking for a duplicate registration certificate and they couldn't find it in the records. It was registered in the system used by the National Statistics Institute (INE), but not in the one used by the City Council, which contains more detailed information and documentation, City Council sources explained.

Although they initially thought the fraudulent registration could have been carried out by someone outside the City Council, they soon discovered it was the work of a civil servant who accessed the building housing the Statistics Department in the evenings, when the offices are closed.

Once the suspect was identified and given the possibility of more similar cases, they reported the facts to the Civil Guard, who began a search. Last Monday, Judicial Police officers seized the suspect's computer and interviewed potential witnesses, and on Wednesday they arrested the civil servant.

At the same time, the City Council opened disciplinary proceedings and took statements from the person involved and from people who might have information about the events. Now, Linares indicated, they are waiting for the investigator of the case to resolve the matter.