Residents' group demands audit of €15 million in files in Canet d'En Berenguer
In Canet d'En Berenguer, a town next to Sagunto in the Camp de Morvedre district, a residents' association wants the town council to set up a commission and order an independent audit of files it puts at around €15 million.
Almost €15 million: that is the figure a residents' platform attaches to the municipal files it wants reviewed in Canet d'En Berenguer, a town next to Sagunto within the Camp de Morvedre district. The group, which calls itself the Platform of People Affected by Corruption (Plataforma de Afectados por la Corrupción), sent its request to the town council after the 17 September plenary session, where — it says, backed by several opposition groups — it did not get sufficient answers about contracts and lawsuits that have dragged through the courts for years.
Its demand runs along two parallel tracks: first, activating a Legal Affairs Commission that would let the different council groups access the paperwork in an orderly way, with technical staff support; second, commissioning an independent external audit able to reconstruct, file by file, what has already been paid, what remains outstanding, and which financial commitments are still open.
The platform itself qualifies its own figure: the €15 million, it says, is a provisional estimate that needs to be broken down case by case before it can be treated as a final number.
Three cases account for most of the amount claimed. The first is the transfer of land in Mas Camarena to a private school, tied to a dispute worth around €2.2 million. The second is the Vitas Amarre hotel project, for which the Valencian regional High Court (Tribunal Superior de Justicia de la Comunitat Valenciana, TSJCV) already set compensation of €276,375 payable by the council. The third is the municipal Cantó swimming pool, with an impact the platform puts at close to €700,000, over which it wants budgets, contract awards and invoices audited one by one. Together, the three add up to €3,176,375 — though, the platform stresses, that total does not yet amount to confirmed financial damage.
The list also includes other fronts: the water and sewage contract with Egevasa (the local water utility), which the TSJCV ordered the council to review on its own initiative in March 2025 over a possible original nullity; legal-advice payments channelled through the Academia Valenciana de Juristas (a legal training body); the municipal tax-collection service; internal staff procedures; and a file known internally as 'Semáforo Foro Rojo'.
What does asking for a reintegro por alcance actually mean? The law governing Spain's Court of Audit (Tribunal de Cuentas) defines it as a first-instance judicial route, separate from the ordinary accounts trial, that a single member judge of the court can resolve alone. In other words, it does not need a full sitting of the court to get moving, and its purpose is to determine whether a public official must personally cover a specific financial loss.
The closest precedent has a name attached. José Antonio Sancho Sempere, the council's secretary for years, was convicted in 2022 by Criminal Court number 18 in Valencia for administrative malfeasance (prevaricación) and misuse of privileged information. Following that conviction, the council itself is already claiming €151,735 before the Court of Audit over invoices issued through the Academia Valenciana de Juristas, an organisation Sancho himself founded in 2000.
The Vitas Amarre case adds another chapter: the licence was granted in 2001 and 2002, was annulled in 2018 after eleven years of paralysis over its conflict with coastal-protection rules, and — as elperiodicodeaqui.com reported in June 2026 — led the Court of Audit to open preliminary proceedings on 19 May of that year to clarify personal liability.
The same outlet had already put figures on two of today's files back in a May 2026 report: the council ended up paying €2.2 million, in instalments between 2025 and 2026, for the 9,000-square-metre Mas Camarena plot, after an initial claim of €23 million; and the damage from annulling the Egevasa water contract stood then, with no final figure, at 'over €5 million'.
The 17 September session itself opened another front of dispute. The opposition and the platform agree that mayor Pere Antoni Chordà dodged the substance of several questions and postponed the legal commission indefinitely; both also say he went as far as calling a councillor a liar, a claim only the official minutes and recording can confirm or disprove.
The council's response has been blunt. Sources from the local government reject the platform's legitimacy — describing it as lacking identifiable representatives — and point to a possible link between whoever signs its statements and a former professional associate of Sancho Sempere. On the €15 million figure, they call it made up, recalling a precedent: the same platform once claimed a €5 million cost for a water-treatment plant that simply does not exist. The governing team also argues that no unregistered association can demand audits over matters mostly already settled in court, and stresses that its management has been transparent throughout.
With both versions on the table — a platform demanding papers and figures, and a council denying legitimacy to whoever is asking — the decision on whether to convene the Legal Affairs Commission now rests with the council itself. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with additional background from Spain's Official State Gazette (BOE) on how the Court of Audit works.