THE MAYOR of Estepona will attend court this week in an effort to dismantle a criminal prosecution demanding he serve five years and six months in prison.
Jose Garcia Urbano requested the new hearing for Wednesday, June 3, to answer charges of misuse of public funds and abuse of authority.
It comes after the Malaga Provincial Court that rejected a defence application to throw the corruption case out entirely.
However, the high court handed the mayor a procedural victory by ruling that the case cannot be tried by a citizen jury.
READ MORE: Man who lost his arm on an Estepona buggy tour wins compensation after seven-year legal fight
The trial has will now be heard by a panel of professional judges in a slimmed down procedure.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor is demanding a prison sentence of five years and six months for Urbano, alongside a 10-year ban from public office.
The prosecution stems from the mayor’s decision to hire his former lover Cristina Pulido as an eventual staff member between February and March 2023.
Investigators maintain the contract was a mere fiction designed to pay Pulido a public salary without her performing any work – of which she walked home with of €5,276.92 in public money.
The case originally opened in December 2024 following witness testimony given by Pulido during a separate probe into alleged harassment brought by her ex-husband against the mayor.
That original case was subsequently archived.
The local town hall stated the June 3 hearing was requested directly by the defence to prove that ‘no irregularity or crime has existed’.
The courtroom appearance comes as separate corruption allegations and public works disputes pile pressure onto the local administration.
The separate court has summoned the girlfriend of the mayor’s son to testify as an official suspect next month.
This investigation is looking into crimes of influence peddling and abuse of power over the public tender of a restaurant inside the new Mirador del Carmen tower on the beach front.
The probe was triggered after the luxury tenth, eleventh, and twelfth floors of the building were awarded to a company in which the son’s girlfriend serves as sole shareholder and administrator.
Meanwhile, opposition groups have attacked a €3.5 million credit expansion for a new El Carmen underground car park project.
Estepona PSOE spokesperson Emma Molina stated that the multi-million euro budget hike was approved behind closed doors via a Local Government Board (Junta de Gobierno Local) consisting solely of Urbano’s Partido Popular politicians.
Molina told The Olive Press that the closed-doors meeting was intentionally designed to bypass a proper plenary debate and hide which municipal budget would end up paying for it.
The spokesperson added that the project draws from European NextGeneration funds that were earmarked for surface landscaping, rather than the underground structural works.
But she went further, pointing out that the cost overrun forms part of a wider pattern of under-budgeting tenders.
Both the Mirador del Carmen exhibition space and the new local athletics stadium also saw budget overruns of at least €1 million.
The Estepona town hall maintains that independent municipal technicians — not political figures — handled all public tenders with total transparency across the public sector platform.
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