Watchdog group demands corruption audit in Canet d'En Berenguer
In Canet d'En Berenguer, a municipality next to Sagunto within the Camp de Morvedre district, a citizens' group is demanding an external audit into council files it estimates at €15 million; the town hall rejects the accusation.
A public standoff between a citizens' group and the Canet d'En Berenguer town hall — a municipality next to Sagunto within the Camp de Morvedre district — has reopened the question of local transparency. The group, calling itself the Plataforma de Afectados por la Corrupción (Corruption Victims Platform), is demanding an independent external audit of a wide range of municipal files, estimating the economic impact at around €15 million, while acknowledging that figure still needs verification and cannot be treated as proven damage.
The scope the group proposes is broad: public procurement, urban planning and heritage, grants, staffing, treasury and internal transparency, with a review of contracts, invoices, agreements and property deals. It suggests a roughly nine-month timeline to complete the whole process, from gathering documents to publishing a final report. The platform insists it is not trying to assign blame — a task it says belongs to the courts — but simply to organise scattered information on these matters.
Demands like this are not unusual in small towns across Camp de Morvedre: the limited technical capacity of small municipal staffs often makes it hard to carry out a thorough internal review of files built up over several terms of office, leaving external audits to clear up doubts that would otherwise go unresolved independently.
Put in context, the size of the municipality highlights the scale of the figure being claimed: with a population of 8,297 according to the 2025 census, Canet d'En Berenguer manages budgets far removed from the €15 million cited in the complaint.
The town hall's response has been blunt: municipal sources call the group a "ghost" entity, saying it has no physical office, no identifiable website and no verifiable public list of members. They also point to an inconsistency over time: before summer, the same organisation put the alleged damage at €8 million, a figure that has now nearly doubled without, according to the council, any explanation for the new calculation.
Regardless of whether the final figure comes close to the €15 million claimed, the audit's outcome will carry considerable symbolic weight: even a partial confirmation would boost the platform's credibility and put pressure on other councils in the district to undergo similar reviews, while a result ruling out irregularities would let the governing team put months of unanswered public accusations to rest.
The governing team cites two recent episodes to back its scepticism toward the platform's claims: a warning about a €5 million cost linked to the Egevasa wastewater plant that ultimately generated no expense at all, and repairs to the municipal Cantó swimming pool, whose real cost — around €700,000 — the council says will not fall on public funds, despite the group's claims to the contrary.
The platform, for its part, argues any audit should be entrusted to specialists unconnected to those who previously handled the files, with expertise in public auditing and administrative oversight, and proposes a monitoring committee with representation from every municipal political group to oversee the process.
A nine-month process like the one the platform proposes would mean reviewing years of contracts, invoices and administrative files one by one — a task that similarly sized councils typically need to hire specialist public-audit firms to carry out, at an added cost neither side has yet put a figure on publicly. For residents of Canet d'En Berenguer, the dispute has a very concrete effect: until the argument over municipal accounts is settled, any spending or investment decision the council tries to push through risks coming under suspicion, which could slow down municipal projects that have nothing to do with the files the platform has flagged.
If the town hall refused to commission the requested audit, the platform's remaining option would be to appeal to higher bodies, such as the Sindicatura de Comptes (Valencian Community audit office), the regional body responsible for auditing local government accounts — though this kind of intervention usually happens on the auditor's own initiative rather than at the direct request of citizen groups.
Although the dispute is administratively confined to Canet d'En Berenguer, its outcome reaches beyond the town's borders: the Camp de Morvedre district shares services across municipalities, and whatever standard is eventually applied to auditing public accounts could become a reference point for neighbouring councils, including Sagunto's, facing similar citizen demands in future. According to El Periódico de Aquí, with population data from Spain's National Statistics Institute via Wikipedia.