The president of the Cabildo de Lanzarote and of the Water Consortium, Oswaldo Betancort, has celebrated the ruling of the Contentious-Administrative Court number 4 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, issued last Tuesday, where the appeal filed by Canal Gestión Lanzarote against the Consortium's decision to elevate to the Canary Islands Price Commission the tariff review corresponding to the fiscal years 2020 to 2024 is declared inadmissible.
Oswaldo Betancort has pointed out that “this ruling confirms that the Consortium has acted in accordance with legality and scrupulously following the established procedure." To which he added: "This president and this government group are not going to put public money at risk, as happened in the last legislature, on account of a tariff increase that did not have the authorization of the competent body,” in reference to the payment of 1.5 million made during the previous mandate by the Consortium to Canal Gestión, according to the institution as an advance for a water tariff increase that the Canary Islands Price Commission subsequently dismissed, and which the Water Consortium now claims from the concessionaire.
Betancort has also assured that “the previous Governing Group had allocated in the 2023 budgets another three million euros more for the same concept. And the legal certainty of the files requires complying with the procedures of the law and the signed contract, issues that the PSOE overlooked in both cases”.
The judicial resolution concludes that the Consortium's agreement by which the tariff review was submitted to the Price Commission constitutes “an act of mere procedure, without its own decisive content, and therefore not subject to autonomous challenge”. In her ruling, the magistrate agrees to the inadmissibility of the appeal without imposition of costs.
The Court understands that the appealed resolution was limited to complying with clause 3.1 of the Specific Administrative Clauses Document, which establishes that tariffs, once approved by the Consortium, must be submitted to the Canary Islands Price Commission. Therefore, it did not decide on the merits of the case nor did it prevent the continuation of the administrative procedure.
The president of the Consortium has stressed that the position of the current governing group is clear: “first there must be a valid authorization from the Prices Commission and a firm resolution that allows applying any tariff update. While that does not happen, not a single euro of the citizens can be committed”.
The Water Councilor of the Cabildo de Lanzarote, Domingo Cejas, insists that “the tariff review must be processed with all legal guarantees, respecting both the contract with Canal and the regional regulations on authorized prices, and avoiding decisions that could generate legal uncertainty or economic damages for the island institution”.
The notified judgment is appealable within a period of fifteen days, as stated in the judicial ruling itself, although the Consortium considers that the pronouncement reinforces the roadmap followed until now in defense of the general interest of Lanzarote and La Graciosa.