The Environmental Prosecutor's Office has already submitted a document to the Sixth Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas announcing that it will appeal the acquittal in the Stratvs case, as it considers that crimes were proven during the trial that have not been punished.
This document is the first step to raise the appeal before the Supreme Court, and it includes the main points on which the Public Prosecutor's Office's allegations will be based. Once admitted for processing, a new term opens for preparing and developing that appeal.
The Stratvs case ruling was issued on December 2, acquitting the main defendant, Juan Francisco Rosa, and the rest of the defendants. Two weeks later, the Prosecutor's Office requested a clarification of the ruling, considering that there were significant omissions and errors in the judgment and that it did not address some of the facts that had been the subject of accusation. Therefore, it requested a "complement" to the "proven facts" section, which omitted many of the data that were presented at trial, especially regarding the execution of the works. It also requested that other "errors" be corrected, such as dates that "do not correspond to the documents in the case"; and that it respond to other facts that the Public Prosecutor's Office recounted in its writing and on which the Court did not comment.
The Prosecutor's Office submitted two documents with these requests to the Sixth Section, on December 16 and 17, and only three days later the Court rejected the request. The order, dated December 20 and written by the same magistrate who was the rapporteur for the ruling, Oscarina Naranjo, argues that a rectification would only be appropriate if "the factual account were obscure, imprecise, doubtful, unintelligible, incomplete, inconsistent, or contradictory," and considers that this is not the case.
Regarding the omitted aspects, the magistrate responded that they had "deliberately excluded those numerous facts included in the extensive indictment that have not been proven after the assessment carried out." And among them, she included not only data such as the cubic meters extracted during the excavation to build the winery, but even the square meters that the construction currently has, despite the expert reports from public officials that were provided to the case detailing the dimensions of the complex.
In the order rejecting the clarification of the ruling, the magistrate refers to "the existence of accessory elements of the construction" - in reference to the restaurant, the kitchen, the store, the paved terraces, and the rest of the elements that surround the winery itself, which did not have any type of authorization - even stating that it was "admitted by all parties," but that it is not "proven" by "the evidentiary activity deployed" by the prosecution.
Precisely, a good part of the Public Prosecutor's Office's appeal will be based on this point, which considers that the crime against land planning was sufficiently proven during the trial. In fact, in the first Stratvs trial, all the politicians and technicians who intervened in the subsequent granting of the activity license were convicted, as the ruling concluded that the construction was illegal and unregulatable and that its opening should not have been authorized.
However, despite that ruling, which is already final and was ratified by the Supreme Court, the ruling in the main case later acquitted all the defendants and the promoter of the winery himself. Now, the Prosecutor's Office hopes that the Supreme Court will review that ruling, as it considers that many facts that had been proven were ignored.
