Cáritas receives €40,000 donation from organisers of Egyptian-themed party at sa Pedrera

Cáritas Sant Antoni received a €40,000 bank transfer on Thursday morning from Van Wyck & Van Wyck, the company behind the private party held at sa Pedrera.

Sant Antoni Town Council announced the charitable contribution after being questioned by this newspaper following reports of the event. At the time, the council also revealed that the company had paid a fee of just €199 to use the public space for the Ancient Egypt-themed celebration. The controversy intensified after it emerged that a small artificial lake had been created using water whose source and subsequent destination remain unknown.

The organisers had planned to donate €40,000 to Cáritas Sant Antoni and a further €10,000 to Motoclub Formentera i Eivissa, according to the Town Council, which highlighted what it described as the event’s “strong charitable character”.

However, the Cáritas donation took a week to arrive. On Wednesday, representatives of the charity told Diario de Ibiza that they had still not received the money and that their previous contact with the organisers had been “much more general”. At no point, they said, had they been told that the donation was linked to a party.

‘Nobody told us it was a party’

“The organisers called me to say that a company was going to carry out some work in Sant Antoni and that they wanted to make a donation”, Mohedas explained on Wednesday. He added: “Nobody told us it was a party. We found out about the party through the press [Diario de Ibiza]”.

A week later, the money has now reached the bank account of the Catholic Church charity.

From that first contact, Mohedas said, Cáritas invited the organisers to visit the organisation and learn more about the programmes it runs in the municipality, so that they could see “what we could use the donation for”. However, the organisers never visited Cáritas.

Gustavo Gómez, coordinator of Cáritas Ibiza, also told Diario de Ibiza that these types of donations can follow “different procedures depending on the company or organisation making them”.

“When we receive an offer of this kind, it is the person or organisation making the donation that subsequently sends us the payment”, he explained.

In some cases, he added, the donation is recorded beforehand in a document or presented publicly. In others, donors prefer to keep the contribution private.

“Sometimes they want some form of written record or an official presentation so they can share the donation on social media. Other times they do not want any publicity at all and, obviously, we respect that”, Gómez said.

The fact that the company had previously made enquiries about the tax treatment of the donation, as the contribution was coming from the United States, had already suggested that it intended to go ahead with the payment.

For that reason, Gómez told Diario de Ibiza on Wednesday that the delay could simply have been due to administrative procedures, and said he expected the donation to arrive shortly, as has now happened.

“I imagine that within a few days the organisers will either contact Cáritas Sant Antoni parish or simply make the bank transfer directly”, he said at the time.