The president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Pedro San Ginés, has announced that he will present a motion, as a matter of urgency, to the ordinary plenary session of the Corporation that will take place next Monday, January 19 at 4:30 p.m., in which he will request the Government of Spain to revoke Repsol's permits to carry out hydrocarbon exploration in the Canary Islands, given that the oil company has announced that "no additional research activities will be carried out in this area and the dynamic positioning vessel Rowan Renaissance will return to Angola to continue with the hydrocarbon exploration program that Repsol is carrying out in that country".
For Pedro San Ginés, "if Repsol is not deceiving the people of the Canary Islands for the umpteenth time and what it announces in its statement is true, it will surely have no problem in renouncing the exploratory rights granted to it by the Government of Spain, since the authorization for the soundings is valid for three years, and to any type of compensation that could occur if the Spanish executive decided to revoke the aforementioned permits".
Similarly, added the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, "if the central government does not doubt Repsol's announcement and assumes that the company has effectively ruled out prospecting in the other eight wells that it initially requested, it should not object to the revocation of the authorization either. In short, if it is not a pre-election strategy to resume exploration after the May elections, in order to cool the spirits of citizens against the Canarian PP until the next elections, as it would be legitimate to think, on the one hand there should be no problem in acceding to said request and, on the other hand, it would be the best way to dispel any doubt in this regard".
Regarding "those who from certain forums and pro-oil editorial lines wield the discourse that the Canarian public administrations should have saved the efforts in opposing the explorations and wait for the results of these to decide in view of them, whether or not to undertake the exploitation of the deposits, it is worth reminding them" -said Pedro San Ginés- "that what is pursued from these administrations is to prevent the extraction of crude oil, and that the Spanish Hydrocarbons Law unequivocally grants exploitation rights of the deposits to those who had exploration rights, in the case of finding what they are looking for".
In that sense, the president of the Lanzarote Cabildo pointed out that "it is false that they are different matters, another thing is that the authorization to undertake the exploitation requires a new file and project to exercise the right to extract acquired with the right to prospect, so the actions undertaken by the Canarian administrations are more than justified".
