“As long as I am mayor, I am not going to allow this outrage”. That is what the first mayor of Arrecife, Ástrid Pérez, has stated this Thursday, who has now announced that the City Council will request the annulment of the fair price of the Ginory land, after having requested a millionaire loan to advance that payment.
The announcement is based on a report from the new secretary, which among other things concludes that this land is “unexpropriable”. Specifically, it points out that in the General Plan that was already in force at that time, the land was assigned to the Capellanía sector, where the owners had to be compensated. Therefore, it indicates that the expropriation mechanism to obtain that land lacks “legitimacy”.
However, the property urged the expropriation in its day, claiming that a fair price be set and, according to the secretary, the mandatory procedures for this were not followed either. On the one hand, in the deadlines, since it requested a reassessment before the deadline provided by law. On the other hand, due to the absence of technical and legal reports.
Therefore, the secretary concludes that the City Council must urge the Provincial Forced Expropriation Jury to review the agreement, due to the different “reasons for nullity” that it details in its report.
“We are going to do it. This government is going to propose the nullity by full right”, the mayor has stated. However, she has also pointed out that it has "little chance of prospering", because “the Forced Expropriation Jury may refuse to initiate that nullity”.
“The law says that when a lot of time passes, the jury can refuse to review the case, and from 2008 until now, imagine how much time has passed. But this government, which is a responsible government, is going to do it. So that no one can say that we didn't try”, added Ástrid Pérez, who at the same time defended the loan she requested to advance the payment of 20 million euros to the property.
Criticism of the previous mayors, focused only on two
In addition, after three years in office, Pérez has lamented that “no mayor” had taken this step before to annul the fair price, although she has only referred to the socialists Enrique Pérez Parrilla and Eva de Anta.
She has held the former responsible for the beginning of the second fair price file, which is the one in force, for having “sent” it to the Expropriation Jury “without the mandatory reports” and without the legal requirements to process it being met.
At that time, a first appraisal from 2006 had already been issued, which was appealed in the Courts by the City Council and ended up being annulled. But before that lawsuit was resolved, the property requested a reassessment in 2008, raising the figure it claimed to 41 million euros. In this regard, the secretary points out that at least four years had to pass to request a reassessment, so it should not have even been processed.
In addition, she emphasizes that when the Justice ended up annulling the first appraisal in 2010, it did so for the same reasons of nullity that it considers existed in the second one, which was set at 20 million euros. However, that one was not even appealed by the City Council. Only the property appealed, claiming that the figure be increased, although it lost the lawsuit.
“The aforementioned agreement of the Provincial Forced Expropriation Jury of Las Palmas dated June 22, 2010, which was notified to the Arrecife City Council in July of that year, was not challenged, neither administratively nor judicially”, the secretary warns in her report. At that time, the Mayor's Office was in the hands of Cándido Reguera, from the PP, although Ástrid Pérez has not referred to that part of the opinion.
In fact, in her speech she has defended her colleague, whom both the PSOE and other formations have blamed for having let the deadline expire without appealing that appraisal. “It is not justified that Cándido Reguera was to blame”, defended Ástrid Pérez, who has described as “indecent” the “going to the media to blame people who are dead and cannot defend themselves”.
She, for her part, has blamed the PSOE, first because she assures that it was the one who authorized in the 80s that what was only a sheet of water be covered with earth, remaining “in private hands”. Then, for allowing the procedure for the reassessment of the fair price to begin in 2008 under the Mayoralty of Enrique Pérez Parrilla.
She has not mentioned what happened in the following years, in which there were up to three more mayors, one of them from the PP. Her next reference has been to Eva de Anta, in this case to criticize that she did not comply with the sentence that ordered the payment to the Ginory property. And it is that she has reiterated that it involved a penalty from the Court, increasing the interest that the City Council had to pay.
In her case, she has continued to defend that by advancing the principal of the debt, of 20 million euros, the City Council has saved on interest, although the property has not waived them. In this regard, Pérez has referred to the latest court order that sets those interests at more than 9 million euros, defending that the City Council has “won” that incident, with respect to the claims that the property had.
