The new tenants of the Salobrena Town Hall are not happy bunnies, because the previous administration hadn’t paid even one bill of the 120 telephone lines at the Town Hall, resulting in an outstanding bill for 100,000 euros. The new mayor claims that the last time that a bill was paid to the telephone company was in 2008.

These sort of surprises are cropping up all over the country where one mayor leaves and a new ones takes his place – a hurried auditing of the municipal accounts always brings a few unpleasant surprises.

Telefonica Movistar is owed 12,900 euros and Vodafone 86,000 euros plus another 9,000 for landlines.

“A private company might spend around 1,000 euros a month on telephone bills, whereas here we have found bills for up to 3,000 euros in one month,” explained the Mayor, Gonzalo Fernandez Pulido. He considers the attitude of the previous administration under the PP and PSI as irresponsible, as they clearly had no intention of paying the telephone bills.

There are opposition council members who still haven’t handed in their mobile phones from when they were in office, the Mayor claims, and had been using them right up to mid July, which was when the he gave the order to shut them down. Furthermore, he pointed out, in some cases these politicians had transferred the number into their names when the numbers belong to the Town Hall as department numbers.

As a result, the Mayor has ordered that the 60 landlines considered essential to be kept. As for the mobiles, (60) he has cancelled eight of them, the rest, barring 18, have had limitation put on them so that they can only be used to call other town-hall numbers.

But it is not only the telephones that are bringing up surprises, they have also found bills dating back to 2006, owing to the provincial press, totaling 22,000 euros (that’s a lot of bloody newspapers!)

As yet the auditing has not finished and the further it progresses the more unpleasant surprises it unearths…

(News; Salobrena, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)