The Standing Committee of the Canarian Coalition has decided to reject the agreement reached between the Cabildo and the Haría City Council to execute the ruling of the Cueva de Los Verdes, pointing out that it represents “a disloyalty” towards the agreement signed at the time by the former president, Pedro San Ginés, and the former northern mayor, Marci Acuña, both from CC. That agreement was never validated by the courts and, according to municipal reports, was “detrimental” to the interests of the City Council, since it did not even recognize compensation to the City Council. For this reason, both institutions have negotiated this new document, which is opposed by the nationalists, who are now in the opposition in the Cabildo but govern with the PSOE in Haría.
“The alleged new agreement is not, nor can it be, an agreement for the execution of any sentence. At most, an addendum or complementary agreement to the current one for its improvement,” says Coalición Canaria in a statement, which criticizes the fact that the new document expressly recognizes the fact that the Cabildo governed by San Ginés lost that lawsuit.
In fact, the party affirms that “it rejects the articles that refer to the execution of the sentence, compensation, damages and losses, interest, etcetera, as if the sentence had been final because the Cabildo lost the appeal, instead of because it was agreed to withdraw it to execute an agreement with which to overcome the judicial conflict, which is what happened.” However, the truth is that the Cabildo did not even withdraw that appeal. What he did, just when the final sentence was going to be issued, was to ask that the “procedure be terminated”, appealing to that agreement signed between Acuña and San Ginés.
"What would have been coherent and logical would have been for the appealing parties to simply withdraw from the appeal, as stated in clause nine of the signed agreement," said the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands at the time, which in May 2017 declared the judgment of first instance final, describing the procedural attitude of the Cabildo in this lawsuit as “erratic” and confirming the conviction.
The ruling also ordered that the file be sent to the Court of First Instance to proceed with the execution of the sentence and indicated that it would be there when the island institution and the northern Consistory could try to "approve" the extrajudicial agreement they reached in October 2016. However, this procedure was never completed and the agreement that according to CC is “in force” and towards which they ask for “loyalty”, was never approved by the courts.
A devastating municipal report
This was also warned by a legal report commissioned by the City Council after the sentence became final. In addition, that opinion indicated that the agreement was signed without the pertinent reports and authorizations, that it incurred nullity defects and that it was "detrimental" to the City Council. "It is clear that the parties did not agree on any amount in respect of damages that was recognized in favor of the Haría City Council in the February 2015 ruling", the report stated, which calculated the compensation corresponding to the Consistory at around 15 million euros.
Regarding the Specific Plan for the Development of the Municipality that was included in that agreement - by which the Cabildo committed to invest 6 million euros in Haría in 10 years - the report indicated that "given the terms of the clause, it should be noted that said agreement seems to respond to a declaration of intentions", since it was established that the Cabildo would finance the works "to the extent of its possibilities". In this regard, the opposition also denounced at the time that the financing of works in Haría by the Cabildo could not be understood as compensation or as an execution of a sentence, given that the Island Corporation makes investments every year in all the municipalities of the island.
Now, the new agreement implies delivering almost 13 million euros to the Consistory with a payment plan of 15 years, but CC insists that “the agreement already signed is much more generous to the Haría City Council and its residents than the one proposed by the PSOE”, and clings to that Haría Development Plan.
“What has been truly detrimental to the residents of Haría has been not executing it, that is, what the president of the Cabildo and the mayor have done is prevent Haría from benefiting from the 1.2 million euros that it would have received in these two years, at a minimum, from the current agreement,” they affirm, despite the fact that the new agreement means that Haría will receive more than ten times that amount in the next 15 years, and directly having the money to execute its own investments.
In addition, CC assures that this plan involved 18 million euros - contrary to what is stated in the municipal reports - and maintains that three disappear with the new agreement (the compensation establishes it at about 15 million, but discounts the money that Haría received as a canon in the two years prior to the signing of the agreement).
"Respect the principles of the current agreement"
Finally, Coalición Canaria announces that it has decided to deliver to the PSOE “a counterproposal for a complementary agreement that, faithful to the Development Plan, contemplates three million euros more for municipal projects and that, unlike the socialist proposal, avoids political and judicial confrontation, respecting the principles of the current agreement.”
“The nationalists do accept that the payment method be implemented in another way and, in any case, that the Development Plan be modified, which is a living plan, changing some of the planned interventions. But discounting from its total outstanding amount, the 2,100,000 euros that have already been contributed under the agreement according to the Cabildo files and that the Haría City Council does not want to recognize,” they add. In this way, they insist on defending the validity of the agreement that was never approved and on attributing to that document the investments made in Haría in recent years, despite the fact that the Consistory's Intervention stated that the municipality had not received a single euro in respect of the compensation that corresponded to it.
For CC, “referring to the execution of the sentence” would be “a procedural fraud and a disloyalty of the Haría City Council to the agreements reached with the Cabildo of Lanzarote and a disloyalty of the PSOE to itself, since it must be remembered that it approved the agreement in force in the Cabildo plenary session.”
Thus, he insists that the island Corporation governed by San Ginés “renounced with this agreement the possibility of completely overturning a sentence that was not yet final”, when what he did was try to avoid - unsuccessfully - that this ruling be issued. Now, after the agreement signed between Pedro San Ginés and Marci Acuña has never been validated or approved, what the new agreement does is execute the sentence. And that, according to their statement, causes a “deep discomfort” in the ranks of CC.