The trial for the illegal license of the thousand homes in Costa Roja already has a sentence. The former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, and Bartolomé Fuentes and Antonio Lorenzo, who served as secretary and head of the Technical Office of the town hall, respectively, sat in the dock.
The three defendants have been convicted of urban planning prevarication with a fine of three months and one day and have been disqualified for one year and nine months, after applying as a very qualified mitigating factor the undue delays to which the criminal procedure was subjected.
As will be recalled, the events that have given rise to this new ruling occurred more than 17 years ago, when the then mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, granted a license to Luis Lleó for the construction of more than 1,000 homes, 228 commercial premises and 2,559 parking spaces at the entrance of Playa Blanca, on land that lacked the appropriate planning for that macro-project.
The Cabildo of Lanzarote became aware of the granting of this license without taking measures against it until, as a result of a motion by the PSOE, it was forced to file a contentious procedure against it. This legal action was reinforced by the complaint that was made personally by the former general secretary of the PSOE of Lanzarote and Councilor for Territorial Policy of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Carlos Espino.
Precisely in this license is the origin of the Unión Case since Lleó tried, through Fernando Becerra, who acted as an intermediary, to get Espino to withdraw the procedure filed against the granting of the license in exchange for a bribe, which was brought to the attention of the UCO, leading to the investigation of one of the most important corruption schemes in the Canary Islands.
As established in the ruling, the project for which the license was granted was contrary to the legal system, "as the land on which the plot was located was not included as urban land in the municipal planning, without it being considered consolidated urban land and, in addition, it was intended to give it a residential use when the land had a tourist allocation."
Throughout the procedure, the defenses tried by all means to justify the opposite and, as has been happening in all procedures related to urban corruption in Lanzarote, it was Felipe Fernández Camero's task to try to distort the provisions of the Island Plan, which he even branded as unconstitutional in his defense of several hotel licenses.
Of particular interest, as stated in the ruling, was the statement of Agustín Domingo Acosta Hernández, a lawyer specializing in administrative law who, already in 2007, had been challenging urban planning licenses for 10 years on behalf of the Cabildo and whose presentation at the trial was very clarifying and revealing about the actions of the defendants.
The intervention of the aforementioned lawyer (proposed as an expert by the Prosecutor's Office) was key to establishing several aspects that, again, the ruling includes verbatim, and it can be highlighted that his presentation was fundamental to prove the infractions of the procedure and the real condition of the land, clearly establishing that it was non-sectorized developable land, being essential that the Island Plan "incorporate criteria for the sectorization of that land and that the Cabildo favorably report the sectorization, with the approval of a partial plan" so the land on which the license was granted could not be urbanized or built on.
It must be remembered that the procedure was blocked until 2019 by the controversial judge Lis, then head of the Court that was investigating the complaint filed by Espino.
