The lawyer of Juan Francisco Rosa, José Antonio Choclán Montalvo, has denied when presenting his conclusions in the first trial of the Stratvs case that his client incurred in a crime of influence peddling. “It may seem bad that a citizen calls a councilman to see if he can help me. It may seem ethically reprehensible. One might think I wouldn't do it”, he pointed out, arguing then that this does not imply incurring in a crime.
And, according to the lawyer, “a mere call of 'see if you can help me', 'see if the license is given to me once and for all', is not enough" to prove the criminal type for which Rosa is accused in this part of the case, where what is being judged is the granting of the classified activity license to Stratvs. Furthermore, he has reproached the Prosecutor's Office and the private and popular accusations for referring during the trial to other facts surrounding the construction and start-up of the Stratvs complex, to which that activity license was granted despite the fact that what was built had nothing to do with what had been authorized.
“We have heard the accusations in a hammering and repeated way talking about meters, that it does not conform to the project, the restaurant, the museum... But this is not relevant here”, he has argued, pointing out that this “has been excluded from this procedure”, since the main part of the Stratvs case will be judged by the Provincial Court. And that, according to Rosa's lawyer, prevented “airing” in this first trial the background prior to the granting of the activity license, which he wanted to analyze as an isolated event.
“Rosa is being judged as a persona non grata”
“Rosa is being judged as a persona non grata and he is being given a global trial”, the lawyer has questioned, insisting on his thesis that, in order to try to prove his “capacity of influence” on the island, other facts related to the businessman should not be raised. Thus, he has criticized that a letter sent by Juan Francisco to the former mayor of Yaiza was put on the table during the trial –in which he told him that the Seprona had come to inspect some works that he was carrying out without a license on his farm in Uga, and asked him to “speed up” the granting of a permit-, or that reference was made to other criminal cases such as the Yate case, in which José Francisco Reyes confessed to having received bribes in exchange for granting illegal licenses to this same businessman.
“A global influence cannot be accepted by the Court”, he has defended, asking that the facts be focused on the calls incorporated to the case and intercepted by the UCO, in which Rosa spoke with the then Councilor for Urban Planning Leonardo Rodríguez. “Beyond a behavior that some will find reprehensible and others will not, it has no criminal relevance”, the lawyer has reiterated.
In one of those conversations, the businessman expressly asked the councilman to “help” him to obtain the classified activity license, since its granting was going to be voted the next day in the Government Board of Yaiza. “The context deprives that call of importance”, Choclán Montalvo has argued, who considers that “in a town where everyone knows each other”, it is not relevant “that someone calls a councilman”.
“The fondness of a public official for a businessman is not inducement”
“Can it really be concluded from that call that he had sufficient capacity to subdue the will of Leonardo Rodríguez?”, the lawyer has posed, who has defended that for the other crime of which Rosa is accused, of inducement to prevarication, to exist, someone has to have a “proven ascendancy” over the other person. Furthermore, he has added that “there is no proof that the councilman was going to do one thing and did another” after that conversation, that is, that “Rosa made the criminal will be born in Leonardo Rodríguez”.
He has even argued that “if the sense of the councilman's vote is because it is Juan Francisco Rosa, it would not prove the inducement either”. “Not even that”, he has stressed, alleging that even if the license had been approved “for being from a certain businessman”, the beneficiary could not be condemned for inducement either. “The fact may be socially inadequate, but the very fondness that a civil servant or a public official may have for a businessman is not inducement”, he has defended.
Regarding that second crime of inducement to prevarication, the lawyer has even described it as a “fraud of law”, since he has pointed out that when the TSJC assumed this part of the case, it only referred in its writing to the crime of influence peddling. “That is why the statute of limitations was raised”, he has pointed out, recalling that he tried to prevent the trial of his client by alleging that that crime would have already prescribed.
This, in addition to being refuted by the prosecutor and the accusations, definitively falls when linking it to a crime of urban planning prevarication, which has an even longer statute of limitations. In this regard, Rosa's own lawyer has ended up admitting that the Prosecutor's Office did include the crime of urban planning prevarication in its initial indictment, although he has questioned that the TSJC resolution did not do so and also that the prosecutor modified his qualification this Thursday when presenting his final conclusions, when he specified that that alleged crime of prevarication would have been committed by inducement and not by action, since he is not a public official.
Criticism of the experts removed in the Cabildo
Juan Francisco Rosa's lawyer has also dedicated a good part of his conclusions to criticizing the instruction of the Unión case, to talking about alleged “defenselessness” that he has not actually alleged in this case and to attacking two experts who have testified during the trial, the Cabildo lawyers Joana Macías and Leopoldo Díaz.
It so happens that both experts, in addition to being questioned by Juan Francisco Rosa, have also been removed from their functions by the president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés. In the case of Polo Díaz, Rosa already managed in his day to get San Ginés to remove him from issuing reports and was later dismissed as head of the Island Plan Office. In the case of Joana Macías, she herself explained during the trial that she has been “excluded” from issuing compatibility reports since she made her expert report at the request of the Stratvs case Court. Furthermore, she also recounted how the “political” management of the Cabildo tried to influence her report, when the director of Territorial Planning, Miguel Ángel Santana, told her that they should “reconcile it” before sending it to the Court, to which she refused.
In his criticisms of these two jurists, Rosa's lawyer has gone so far as to affirm that they are “experts of favor” and that it is “evident that they adapted their purposes to the direction that was expected of them”, although he has not specified by whom. “Not so much from the Public Prosecutor's Office, but probably from public opinion”, he has added later, when talking about one of those reports. Furthermore, he has affirmed that “they have a relative importance” and that they were refuted by other 'counter-reports' commissioned by the president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés.
It should be remembered that the content of those opinions was about the Special Plan of La Geria, about which Joana Macías warned in her expert report that it had defects of nullity. And Leopoldo Díaz agreed on the same thing later, when San Ginés commissioned him to do one of those 'counter-reports'. Later, it was the courts that annulled the Special Plan of La Geria declaring its illegality. And despite the fact that there is already a first firm sentence –beyond the fact that there are other pending ones that will no longer have practical effects, since the document is already annulled- Rosa's lawyer and the expert witness that he contributed to the trial, Blanca Lozano, insisted on defending the “validity” of that Plan.
An illegality “legally debatable”, according to the defenses
Based on that expert and another one also contributed by the defenses, Delia López -who is a trusted staff member as an advisor to Gladys Acuña in the City Council and who shared an office with the mayor-, both Choclán Montalvo and the rest of the lawyers have insisted that the legality of the permit granted to Stratvs “is controversial” and therefore “there can be no conviction”, because for that it would have to be something “blatantly gross”. “What is legally debatable can never constitute a crime of prevarication”, Rosa's lawyer insisted, with an argument that has later been repeated by the rest of the defenses.
In their conclusions, almost all of them have also agreed in their criticisms of the expert Joana Macías, who although she offered one of the most forceful statements, transmitted a similar message to that of other experts from the Cabildo and the Canary Islands Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment, who agreed not only on the illegality of the Stratvs complex, but on the illegality of the activity license that was granted to it and which is the one being judged in this piece. Even the head of the Technical Office of Yaiza, who also testified in the trial, confirmed that the PIOT must prevail in the ordering of rural land, which implies that that construction could not have been authorized, since the Island Plan expressly prohibits it.
Faced with this, the expert contributed by Rosa's defense argued that the Island Plan is not valid for ordering rural land. Furthermore, both she and the lawyer who advises Acuña and who testified as an expert argued that when the Government Board of Yaiza approved the activity license, it was actually already granted by administrative silence. Something that they argue would exempt them from criminal responsibility, although the rest of the experts rejected that a license that contravenes the planning can be obtained by administrative silence. “It would be a perversion. Is a nuclear power plant or a radioactive waste deposit going to be authorized by silence in La Geria?”, the expert Joana Macías exemplified.