The Special Plan of La Geria, annulled by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands, "has enormous significance for the final resolution" of the Stratvs case, in which the Prosecutor's Office is asking for 15 years in prison for the businessman Juan Francisco Rosa. That is what the Government of the Canary Islands itself argued when presenting an appeal to try to maintain the validity of that Plan, asking the Supreme Court to annul the first instance ruling.
The Government filed that appeal, which was not even admitted for processing, despite having assured that it would not do so. Even, from the Ministry of Territorial Policy they denied to La Voz de Lanzarote that an appeal had been filed, which was only known when it was rejected by the TSJC.
Now, La Voz has had access to the writing, of 13 pages and signed by the lawyer Pino Pérez, as representative of the legal services of the Government of the Canary Islands. And in it, reference is made to the Stratvs case as one of the "reasons" why they considered that there was "cassational interest" for the Supreme Court to review the ruling that annulled the Plan. Even, the Government provided documents of that criminal case, in which Rosa has used the Special Plan of La Geria in his defense, alleging that with it the winery was "perfectly legalized".
"The ruling affects a large number of situations"
"The ruling affects a large number of situations, both by itself and by transcending the case object of the process," the Government of the Canary Islands stated in its appeal, dated December 28. On the one hand, it argued that "the activity of the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment may be affected, slowed down, in relation to the execution of resolutions to restore the infringed legal order and the altered and transformed reality, if there is no legal certainty regarding the validity and effectiveness of the Special Plan of La Geria".
In this regard, it should be emphasized that precisely that "validity and effectiveness" of the Plan will cease to exist as soon as the TSJC ruling is final, which is precisely what the Canarian Government was trying to avoid with its appeal. And from then on, the space will once again be governed by the Island Plan, which guarantees its protection.
On this point, the Government's appeal referred to another judicial procedure, in this case administrative litigation, against a private individual who intends to avoid the demolition ordered by the Apmun of a house in La Geria. With this, it intended to argue that if the appeal for cassation before the Supreme Court was not accepted, "the activity of the Apmun could be slowed down".
A Plan of "enormous significance" for an imminent trial
To this, the appeal of the Canarian Government added that there are also "criminal proceedings", although it only cited the Stratvs case, "in which without any doubt the document of final approval of the Special Plan of La Geria has enormous significance for its final resolution". And in this case, that "significance" would be related to the criminal responsibilities that Juan Francisco Rosa is trying to evade by using the Plan de La Geria in his defense.
"The final approval of the Plan and the declaration and express recognition made in said Plan that the Stratvs winery is one of the eleven facilities that structure, that is, that vertebrate the protected landscape of La Geria, has meant the legalization of the Stratvs winery, in the event that it could be proven that it was not adapted at the time of its construction to the administrative legislation of application", argues the defense brief presented by Juan Francisco Rosa, in view of the first trial he will face for the Stratvs case -which was divided into two parts- and which is scheduled for next June.
However, it should be remembered that at least two technicians of the Cabildo, one of them designated as an expert in that judicial case, have agreed that the winery would not even be legalizable with that annulled document, despite the fact that it gave it a "privileged" treatment, by equating it to the historical wineries of La Geria. In addition, they already warned then of "vices of nullity" in the Plan, which were later confirmed by the TSJC when annulling the document. Among other things, this has made meaningless the modification of the Plan de La Geria that Coalición Canaria has been trying to approve for years in the Cabildo, and that involved increasing the buildability and the height allowed to the wineries, which were some of the points in which Stratvs continued to fail to comply, even with the Plan approved after its construction.
In addition to crimes against land planning, for having built a complex of 12,000 square meters -including, in addition to the winery, a restaurant, a store and several paved terraces- with a license to build a warehouse of 900 meters, Rosa is also accused of another long list of crimes. Among them, crimes against heritage -for having demolished a pre-existing protected house-, of usurpation -for occupying land of the Negrín family for this construction-, against the environment -for the emission of polluting discharges-, of fraud and influence peddling. Along with him are accused politicians and technicians of the City Council of Yaiza, the Cabildo of Lanzarote and the Government of the Canary Islands.
