The Environment Prosecutor's Office of Las Palmas has presented this Wednesday a document before the Sixth Section of the Provincial Court requesting a clarification of the Stratvs case ruling, since it considers that there are important omissions and errors in the ruling, which does not pronounce on some of the facts that were the subject of accusation.
Therefore, it requests a "complement" to the proven facts in the ruling, which acquitted all the defendants in the procedure. This procedure is a preliminary step to the possible appeal of the Public Prosecutor's Office, which in its day described what happened with the Stratvs winery as one of the biggest environmental attacks committed on the island of Lanzarote.
In the case of the main defendant, the businessman Juan Francisco Rosa, it recalls that, among other crimes, he was tried for usurpation of real estate and for crimes against land planning, against historical heritage and against the environment, in its form of carrying out excavations and extractions affecting the values of a protected natural space, in competition with "a continued crime of theft of historical value goods of special gravity due to their amount." Regarding this last crime, the Prosecutor's Office points out that it was expressly detailed in the indictment, without having been answered in the ruling. "Again we find that in the proven facts any factual description in relation to them has been omitted," the document states, which raises the same in relation to another of the defendants, the architect Miguel Ángel Armas Matallana, who was accused of the same crime.
"The Public Prosecutor's Office, in its provisional conclusions, quantifies the extraction carried out in cubic meters, without any allusion to the extraction and excavation carried out in the sixth proven fact," it questions. In addition, with respect to Matallana, it affirms that some of the documents that were in the case have also been ignored, such as the certificate of completion of work that he signed, and for which he was accused of a continued crime of falsehood in a public document. "In the proven facts of the ruling, no mention is made of the drafting and presentation of the execution project by this defendant," the Prosecutor's Office also adds.
To this is added other omissions regarding who was the manager of the Island Water Council, José Juan Hernández Duchemí, whose intervention is not alluded to in the proven facts of the ruling. Regarding the head of the Cadastre in Yaiza, Blas Noda, the Public Prosecutor's Office underlines that the alternative qualification that he raised on the last day of the trial has not even been taken into account, when raising his conclusions to definitive, qualifying them as "falsehood in an official document committed by imprudence." "Again in the proven facts any factual description has been disregarded (omitted)," he argues.
"Likewise, the participation of the company BTL Lanzarote S.L. lacks factual basis, also accused of a crime against land planning with serious affectation to the values object of protection of a protected natural space and of a crime against historical heritage with serious affectation to the values object of protection of a protected natural space," adds the Public Prosecutor's Office.
In addition, it requests that other "errors" be corrected, such as dates that have been introduced in the proven facts and that "do not correspond to the documents in the file"; and that a response be given to other facts that the Public Prosecutor's Office related in its document and on which the Chamber has not expressed itself.
It even points out that the dates of the days on which the oral hearing was held "are incomplete, since the days 15 and 16 of January, 11 of February, 12 of March and 24 and 28 of July have been omitted."
For all these reasons, it requests that a new resolution be issued supplementing the ruling, which gave more credit to the private experts provided by Juan Francisco Rosa than to the testimony of the numerous officials, technicians and agents of the Civil Guard and Seprona who testified in the trial and who issued reports during the investigation of the case.
While this request is resolved, the term provided to appeal the ruling, which was only five business days, and which was about to conclude, will stop counting. Now, the Public Prosecutor's Office will await the response of the Court to adopt its decision.
