The Court of First Instance number 5 of Arrecife has accepted the letter of allegation presented on March 27 by the Water Consortium of Lanzarote requesting the suspension of the execution of the final judgment since 2018 that was going to leave Órzola without water supply from this Friday due to "a lawsuit filed by Benjamín Perdomo, socialist councilor of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, and his family".
According to the Cabildo, "in the letter sent to the Court, it is recalled that after the awarding of the management of the integral water cycle to Canal Gestión, this company became, according to the tender contract, the owner of the deposit located on the family farm of Benjamín Perdomo and therefore the Court was requested to also send the eviction order to Canal Gestión."
The Consortium also argued that "of the 174,878 square meters of the farm, this public entity only occupied just over a thousand to install the tank and the underground pipes necessary to supply water to the town of Órzola, so the property has always had at its disposal the remaining approximately 173,000 square meters of the farm."
Based on these arguments, the aforementioned Court has suspended, as requested by the Water Consortium of Lanzarote, the execution of the judgment that forced the eviction of the deposit this Friday, April 12, as well as "transferred the order to Canal Gestión, which has been granted a period of ten days to present allegations."
The president of the Cabildo and also of the Water Consortium of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort, regrets "having reached this situation due to the refusal of the property to accept the proposal made by the Consortium to acquire the square meters of land occupied by the pipes and the deposit."
For his part, the island councilor of Water, Domingo Cejas, recalls that "it was the Haría City Council that built this deposit more than 40 years ago" on the surface of land ceded by the family of Benjamín Perdomo for this purpose. However, "the fact that this cession was never formalized in a document invalidated the one made in turn by the Haría City Council to the Consortium after its creation."