The case for the illegal macro-license of Costa Roja, which is finally close to going to trial, has suffered a stormy investigation of more than 13 years. Several changes of judge, a paralysis of years during the stage of the controversial Rafael Lis and even volumes that were missing have marked this procedure, which came to investigate up to six people not only for urban crimes, but also bribery, fraud against the administration and embezzlement, and that splashed recognized professors and even former members of the Judiciary.
Finally, only three will be in the dock -again the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, the former secretary, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, and the former head of the Technical Office, Antonio Lorenzo, who have already been convicted in other cases-, and only for crimes of prevarication. In addition, the undue delays in the investigation, which the Prosecutor's Office points out have been "extraordinary", have led to a reduction in the penalties requested for them, leaving them in the case of the Public Prosecutor's Office in a fine that does not reach 4,000 euros, in addition to three years and three months of disqualification.
For its part, the popular accusation raises this request to one year and three months in prison and seven years of disqualification, but even so, many of the crimes that were put on the table during the investigation have not been clarified. In fact, several were dismissed not for not seeing evidence of a crime, but because evidence that implicated former members of the judiciary was annulled.
The first charge that fell was that of the beneficiary of that license, Luis Lleó, because no "sufficient evidence" was found that he bribed the mayor in exchange for the granting of that illegal permit. This same businessman, however, was convicted of bribery in the Unión case. In fact, he himself ended up confessing that he tried to bribe the then councilor Carlos Espino to unblock the construction of this same plot, when the license granted to him by Reyes was suspended by the Courts.
Espino denounced that attempted bribery and had also previously filed a complaint for the granting of that license, which is what gave rise to this case. But in addition to him, there was also another complainant, the architect Enrique Ruiz, who drafted the basic project to urbanize the plot and testified against Lleó. In that statement, he even pointed to the then secretary general of the PNL, Pedro de Armas, as an alleged intermediary between Lleó and José Francisco Reyes in this operation. De Armas -who also received illegal licenses from Reyes, for which these same three defendants were convicted- was later called to testify as a witness in the Costa Roja case, denying Ruiz's accusation. Finally, that line of investigation was closed and the proceedings against Luis Lleó were dismissed, considering that there were indications but not enough.
Unión opened a new line of investigation with serious implications
Three years later, thanks to several emails seized during the investigation of the Unión case, the proceedings against Lleó in this case were also reopened, and the lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero and the professor and jurist Rafael Entrena Cuesta were also added as defendants for alleged crimes of prevarication, fraud against the administration and embezzlement of public funds.
In those emails, it was highlighted that Lleó himself gave instructions to the jurist Rafael Entrena to prepare a report that would endorse the Costa Roja license. However, the one who paid for that report was the Yaiza City Council, which paid 27,000 euros.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the professor's report was an "absolute farce" to endorse the license that the City Council had already granted to Lleó for the basic project of the work, to justify the subsequent execution license and also to give arguments to the defense of Reyes and Bartolomé Fuentes and Antonio Lorenzo, who had already been charged with these facts.
"With all this, the mayor would be shielded with respect to the criminal process, by having a solid legal support", Lleó maintained in one of the emails he sent to Ramón Entrena Cuesta (brother of Rafael Entrena), in which he gave precise instructions on how to prepare that report that was going to be paid by the City Council.
In that email, also addressed to the former member of the General Council of the Judiciary Enrique Arnaldo Alcubilla (who was a partner in the same firm), Lleó even asked them to influence this criminal procedure against Reyes and two technicians, which had just been opened at that time.
"It would be very interesting to do personal management with the preparer or environment of the magistrate-judge, being the first destination as a magistrate and is quite lost -he has been in the Court for a week-, in order to achieve that at least until after the elections there are no scares with this criminal matter", Lleó came to propose in that email.
Key evidence that was annulled
To this were added other emails in which Luis Lleó gave them instructions on how they should invoice the City Council for that report that he was actually directing -“they ask me to send it to you signed and the City Council seals and signs it for us, where we put the object of the report, term and price”, he indicated in one of those emails-, as well as personal communications with the then secretary of the Consistory, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, who is still accused in the case.
As for Felipe Fernández Camero, the Prosecutor's Office recalled then that the City Council "had been counting for more than 15 years" on his "advice", both in "the vast majority of the numerous lawsuits" for illegal licenses, as well as in the criminal cases that were open at that time against Reyes. In addition, Fernández Camero "was the lawyer who defended the same theses as Luis Lleó, but in the name of the Yaiza City Council", in the contentious lawsuit that ended with the annulment of the Costa Roja license. In fact, he himself contributed to the Court the report of Entrena Cuesta, praising his figure as a recognized jurist, reproducing part of his report and fully assuming its content.
However, all that evidence -which also reflected Lleó's relationship with two magistrates who at that time were part of the Constitutional Court, and who according to the UCO advised him to evade taxes- had to be left out of the procedure a few months after having incorporated them, when Lleó managed to have the registration of his home in the Unión case annulled due to a formal defect. And although that did not prevent his conviction for a crime of bribery in Unión, where he ended up confessing before the forcefulness of the rest of the evidence, in this other case it did lead again to his dismissal, and also to that of Camero and Entrena Cuesta. What was done then by the magistrate of the Court was to open a separate piece, based on the file that had already been requested from the Consistory on the payment of that report. That piece had to be sent to distribution so that the Court to which it corresponded would open proceedings, but nothing has been heard about its evolution either.
Paralysis during the stage of Lis and volumes of the missing summary
Since then, practically no new proceedings have been carried out in a procedure whose investigation had already ended in 2010, when the judge concluded it and initiated the procedure of abbreviated procedure to bring to trial the three people who will finally sit on the bench. The last outstanding ones were those that took place in 2013, when the investigation was reopened to incorporate the evidence of Unión that had to be discarded a few months later. Afterwards, after the arrival of Rafael Lis to the Court, the case entered a total paralysis, as the Prosecutor's Office points out in its indictment.
This magistrate retired in March of last year and since then, his successor has reactivated several cases that had been delayed in his Court, including this one of Costa Roja. Shortly before that retirement, Lis was sanctioned and removed from his position for six months by the General Council of the Judiciary, for a very serious fault in his work as a magistrate. Specifically, Lis continued to intervene in a case in which he had been challenged for his links with the businessman Juan Francisco Rosa, who in turn has also shared interests with Luis Lleó.
In addition to keeping the case paralyzed for years, the secretary of that Court also recorded in 2016 that several volumes of the summary had disappeared, which were finally found “improperly filed in the Definitive Archive of the Court, on dates not clarified”.
Finally, after this stormy investigation, the case is finally approaching the holding of the trial, although only with three defendants in the dock and only for crimes of urban prevarication.