The auditor of the Tías City Council, Miguel Ángel Guerra, acknowledges in a report signed on March 24 that it is "practically impossible" for said City Council to face the payment of 3.3 million euros that a sentence of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) requires to pay, since "there is no liquidity for it".
The report adds that to this "is added the high existing debt with suppliers, as well as that no treasury operation could be requested for this purpose as long as we are at the maximum limit for this type of indebtedness." It also says that it is "extremely complex to foresee that item in a single budget with sufficient credit to comply with the payment, due to the tightness of said budget."
It should be remembered that last March it was learned that the TSJC had condemned the City Council to pay 3.3 million euros to the owners of two plots of land in Puerto del Carmen of about 500 square meters, which were expropriated without compensation. The sentence was from March 2010 and the City Council hid its existence for a year.
Last month, in a plenary session requested by the opposition, the mayor, José Juan Cruz (PSOE), assured that he is considering other alternatives, such as changing the ordinance of the area to allow it to be built or making an exchange with the owners. Cruz assures that the City Council has appealed to the Supreme Court.
The owners made allegations to the municipal budget of 2011 for a value of 2.5 million, which is the amount set by the Provincial Jury of forced expropriation in February 2008, ensuring that this resolution is firm since Tías did not challenge it. The budget cannot be definitively approved until a solution is given to these allegations.
Reproaches to the Mayor's Office
In his report, the auditor reproaches that he was sent that sentence a month ago, "once he had knowledge of it as a consequence of the allegations presented by the plaintiff." He says that he only has knowledge of these processes at the moment in which the payment is necessary and that in this case it is not known if the sentence has been appealed, if it is final or unassailable, as well as if the decision of the Expropriation Jury was challenged.
"This implies?adds? one more example of the situation of absolute and generalized ignorance of this department in what refers to the judicial processes in which the institution is incurred, be they of the nature that they are, which makes impossible a control as well as a possible budgetary forecast both of the expenses that suppose at the level of legal defense as a slight vision of the amounts to which the corporation can at any moment be condemned to pay as a consequence of said processes".
S.G. / ACN Press
