The Supreme Court has overturned Juan Francisco Rosa's latest attempt to continue using the annulled Plan de La Geria for his defense in the Stratvs case trial, in which he faces a 15-year prison sentence request from the Prosecutor's Office. The businessman has been clinging to this document even after it was annulled with a final judgment, and on February 3rd he made a last attempt to try to maintain the fiction that the Plan was still in force.
To do this, he referred to other lawsuits initiated in his day against the document that remained open, but which had actually lost meaning as there was already a first final ruling. In one of them, initiated by the company Peña del Camello, a first instance judgment had also been issued declaring the Plan null, but Rosa himself and one of his companies, BTL Lanzarote, appealed that ruling.
In these cases, as has happened now, when the Supreme Court analyzes the appeal and sees that there is already another final judgment annulling the same document, it ends up rejecting it without even analyzing it. Therefore, what Juan Francisco Rosa's lawyer unsuccessfully tried to avoid is that this deliberation of the Court took place, to keep the lawsuit alive.
A writing to try to delay the deliberation of the Court
The Fifth Section of the Supreme Court had set February 4th for that deliberation, but just the day before, the representation of Rosa and BTL presented a writing "requesting the suspension of the vote and the ruling due to criminal prejudice", alleging that the Stratvs case trial was being held. However, the Chamber has declared "inadmissible" its claim, stating that what happens in that trial will not condition its ruling on the Plan de La Geria in any way.
In his writing, Rosa's lawyer, Felipe Fernández de las Heras, argued that the document declared the Stratvs winery as a "structuring equipment" of the protected landscape of La Geria. That is, as two reports from Cabildo jurists warned, the document gave preferential treatment to this winery that was built illegally, fitting it in and equating it to the rest of the historical wineries.
"Since the approval of the Plan, Stratvs has been perfectly legalized," Rosa's defense even stated in the first criminal trial he faced for this cause. Now, in the main trial of the Stratvs case, he intended to continue using the Plan de La Geria, which is actually firmly annulled since 2016, although his defense has tried to maintain the opposite, providing documentation from other open lawsuits, such as this one that has just been definitively settled.
An "impossible" request
In its judgment, dated last Monday, February 17th, the Court considers that it is "impossible" to accept the request made by the businessman, who did not even justify why that alleged "criminal prejudice" existed that he invoked to request that the ruling be delayed.
"His allegation ends there, without being accompanied by the citation of the criminal type in which the conduct would hypothetically be subsumed, nor by any other document, except for a summons in which, as a relevant fact and next to the expression 'injured party', we only read: 'Tax Agency (State Tax Administration Agency)'. In view of this, it is clear that we cannot accept that request, since both from the allegations made in the writing, as well as from the tenor of the single document that accompanies it, it becomes impossible to deduce what is required by art. 10.2 of the LOPJ, that is: that the final pronouncement of that criminal case cannot be dispensed with for the proper decision of this appeal on cassation, or that the hypothetical pronouncement that is reached directly conditions our decision," the judgment states.
Thus, after declaring the "inadmissibility" of Rosa's request, it begins to analyze the appeal and concludes that it "has lost its object" as there is already a final judgment issued in November 2016, as the businessman's defense knew. In this way, it definitively closes this lawsuit, thus preventing the businessman from continuing to use it to simulate that the courts have not yet ruled firmly on that Plan.
