THE WEATHER
Edition 349
o
Friday 24th November 2017
STARTING FROM SCRATCH
rihuela council will not automatically extend the beach bars contract for the Orihuela Costa which is scheduled to end at Easter next year, after an Orihuela judge’s report suggested that the awarding of the contract back in 2014 “could lead people to suspect that it may have been criminal in character”. Orihuela’s beaches councillor Luisa Boné announced this week that the authority would not implement a two-year extension option to the deal with Chiringuitos del Sol because of the legal investigations that are going on. Boné said:- “We are looking at a contract that is being looked at for an alleged fraud, but I have no doubt that the municipal
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technical services have always behaved to a strict legal standard.” In June, Orihuela’s excoastal councillor Martina Scheurer was interviewed by the National Police Fiscal Crime Unit over fraud allegations, which she has strongly denied. The Unit also talked to franchise winner Chiringuitos del Sol’s manager, Thomas Wolfalng, and Orihuela council’s technical officer with responsibility for contracts. The investigating judge’s report has been quoted in the Información newspaper as concluding that there were three areas of concern as Chiringuitos retained the contract that it had first won in 2006. That includes that the
ing. Everybody, including some children, were found to be in good health after being examined by the Cruz Roja. A third boat also appeared off the Torrevieja coast on Sunday, with 11 people on board, intercepted and taken to the Guardia Civil barracks, and then another boat arrived off Cabo Roig on Tuesday night (refugees pictured that evening at the Torrevieja barracks), with three children in it. They were all treated by the Cruz Roja. Francisco Bernabe, the national government representative in the region of
1 Bedroom 1 Bath Top-Floor Apartment in Torrevieja TY ER OP THE R P F O EEK W
Property ID: 0162353 - 45,000€ allegation that the company benefitted in the process by the fact that rival bidders were automatically excluded, because they did not have the necessary “Q”
quality tourism certificate, and that they were not given enough time to get one, something that Chringuitos had obtained a few months earlier.
IMMIGRANT INFLUX
uthorities say over 500 migrants were saved by rescue boats purely over the weekend period, as they attempted the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea from Africa, in the biggest wave of arrivals seen this year, which brings the national total of sea migrant people coming to Spain to over 15 thousand in 2017. Almost 90 migrants arrived off the Alicante Province coast between Friday and Tuesday night. The Guardia Civil intercepted two boats carrying a total of 21 people, around 20 kilometres off the coast of Torrevieja last Friday morn-
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Murcia, said over 400 migrants arrived at Cartagena on Saturday after being pulled off of 44 different boats between Friday and Saturday, including one craft off the coast of Pilar de la Horadada, which
had 10 people on board, including two children. The boats were reportedly launched from Algeria and, like in the case of Alicante Province, the Cruz Roja were deployed to Cartagena to attend to the migrants.
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