The president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, failed to get the Water Consortium to approve the agreement with Club Lanzarote on Friday. Moreover, as two of its members have confirmed to La Voz de Lanzarote, just before its celebration the agenda was changed so that what was submitted to a vote was not the agreement itself, but only its "referral to the Courts". Thus, what will be sent "to the Courts" is a document unsigned by the parties and without having been approved by the Consortium or by the Water Council, which has not even met yet, after San Ginés canceled the session he had convened last week.
It should be remembered that this agreement has been strongly questioned not only by the opposition, but by the PSOE, which until last Thursday was a government partner of CC, for considering that said agreement is of "dubious legality". Both the socialists and Podemos and Ciudadanos have denounced that Pedro San Ginés intends with it to "influence" or "evade his criminal responsibility" in the case of the seizure of the Montaña Roja desalination plant, in which he is accused after the lawsuit filed by Club Lanzarote.
The president of the Cabildo, however, was not finally present at the Consortium session, but delegated his functions to Echedey Eugenio. And although it was he who convened this session, and also the ones convened and then suspended last week, several parties had warned that he should abstain due to his judicial involvement in the matter.
In fact, the PSOE warned that the secretary, Pancho Perdomo, accused along with San Ginés in that case, had decided to abstain. His absence was what forced the cancellation at the last minute of the sessions scheduled last week and although the president then stated that the reason was that Perdomo was "outside the island" and that he was "irreplaceable", finally this Friday the secretary of the City Council of Tinajo acted as such in this session of the Water Consortium.
The Cabildo does not refer to the change of agenda
After the Consortium meeting, the Cabildo sent a statement indicating that the assembly had "limited itself" to approving the referral to the Courts of that agreement with Club, without making any reference to the change of agenda. Even, in statements to La Voz, the mayor of Tinajo, Jesús Machín, denied that there had been such a change and assured that from the beginning it was planned that only that referral of the document to the Courts would be voted on. However, both the mayor of San Bartolomé, María Dolores Corujo, and the mayor of Teguise, Oswaldo Betancort, have confirmed to La Voz that the agenda was changed.
Thus, despite the initial intention was to approve the agreement, authorizing San Ginés to sign it, and despite the fact that this body of the Consortium (formed by the Cabildo and the town councils) is mostly controlled by Coalición Canaria, finally the agreement was not approved and the content of the vote had to be modified.
That allowed the proposal to be approved, although with the vote against of the mayor of San Bartolomé, against whom San Ginés lashed out in the statement sent by the Cabildo after the meeting. "In my opinion, the mayor is not concerned about any of the reasons why she opposes this possible agreement to the extent that the content of the agreement is endorsed by legal reports: two from the director of the Legal Services of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, and a third favorable report from the comptroller of the Consortium. What she really seems to be concerned about is that there is an agreement and the problems are solved, -given that it is in the courts-, being able to defend one thing and at the same time the opposite in order to maintain the strategy of opposition to the government from the government in which until yesterday she has been installed", San Ginés said.
Precisely, the actions of the president with respect to Club Lanzarote have been one of the reasons in which the PSOE has justified its departure from the government group, as Corujo herself stated in the press conference offered this Thursday to announce the rupture of the pact. In it, the secretary of the Lanzarote socialists questioned the legality of the agreement and accused the president of the Cabildo of "putting the institutions", specifically the Consortium and the Insular Water Council, "at the service of his particular judicial strategy". "We cannot support a president who does not assume his judicial responsibility and a party that supports him, pending the opening of the oral trial, and who intends to use the bodies of the Cabildo for an unknown judicial strategy, but that does not conform under any concept to the technical, legal and intervention reports necessary to give it validity", he affirmed.
