The fight against environmental crimes in Lanzarote has been reinforced. It had not been made public, but the truth is that for four weeks, the island has had a specific prosecutor for the Environment area. In practice, Ignacio Stampa will be "a point of contact" with Las Palmas, as defined by the chief prosecutor of the province, Guillermo García-Panasco. And in these matters he will report directly to the provincial head of that section, without needing to go through the coordinator of the Prosecutor's Office in Lanzarote, Miguel Pallarés. Something that in itself is also a novelty, since until now all prosecutors were under the orbit of the island coordinator.
"This is a purely organizational issue, of restructuring. There is no reason to read anything into this," explains García-Panasco. He also does not want to comment on the questions that Pallarés has received in some sectors, especially due to his family connection with the lawyer Felipe Fernández Camero, who defends the interests of several urban developers and the former mayor of Yaiza himself, José Francisco Reyes, in the criminal proceedings against him.
"Regarding that issue, I only want to say that I am responsible for a staff whose professionalism I know and I would like to highlight. And everything that is rumors and insinuations, logically I cannot attend to that. And in many cases they seem frankly unfair to me. And from there, there are some specific and determined issues that are being investigated and when a decision is made by the Prosecutor's Office, it will always be adopted according to strictly legal criteria, and leaving aside any question of honorability of each of them and of course, in their case, the duty of corresponding abstention that the law imposes on all prosecutors who at any given moment may be involved in some matter," García-Panasco told La Voz.
The fiscal reform
Formally, the designation of Ignacio Stampa coincides with the reorganization that has been carried out as a result of the reform of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecutor's Office. After that reform, an autonomous structure of the Prosecutor's Office in the Canary Islands has been created, which did not exist until now, so a superior prosecutor, Vicente Garrido, and two provincial chief prosecutors have been chosen. In the case of Las Palmas, that position was occupied at the beginning of March by Guillermo García-Panasco. And his first decision was to appoint an Environmental Prosecutor in Lanzarote.
"It was something that, in quotation marks, affected me very directly, because I was the delegated Environmental Prosecutor for the province of Las Palmas, and since I knew that I had to renounce those functions because I assumed the position of chief prosecutor, I thought that this had to be fixed," he explains. And the way to "fix it" was to restructure this section in the province, with a delegate in the capital and with a "point of contact in each of the places where we have headquarters". That is, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in San Bartolomé de Tirajana, in Puerto del Rosario and in Arrecife.
However, García-Panasco's involvement with the Environment area was not the only reason, according to himself, since there were also direct "indications" from the national coordinator of this area to reinforce the structure of the Prosecutor's Office against environmental crimes, mainly related to urban planning and discharges.
The Country
"The incidence of environmental and urban crime in the Canary Islands is relevant, and it needed something that has been done in recent years, which is a dedication from specialization. The Prosecutor's Office has strongly committed to this issue and will continue to commit," explains Guillermo García-Panasco.
A commitment that in the case of Lanzarote, coincided in time with the controversial report published in the newspaper El País under the title "A Marbella emerges in Lanzarote", and in which it was reported that a third of the luxury hotels in Lanzarote have been declared illegal and that there are criminal proceedings open against the former mayors of Yaiza and Teguise, José Francisco Reyes and Juan Pedro Hernández.
Is there any relationship between the publication of that news and the changes in the Prosecutor's Office? "Not necessarily, I think it has been a matter of coincidence," says García-Panasco in this regard. "What was published was a kind of compilation information, but it gave the feeling that nothing had been done before or that it was going to start being done now, and I think that is unfair. In those matters, the Prosecutor's Office has been aware of its processing and is committed to the prosecution of certain infractions. What we have done now is reorganize the service, because it is true that sometimes there is some difficulty due to the island issue, and it is more operational that there is someone on the ground who is on top of the issue".
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IGNACIO STAMPA, THE "LINK" AGAINST ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME
He is 34 years old, Lanzarote was his first destination when he left Madrid and now, after four years on the island, Ignacio Stampa becomes the link of the Environmental Prosecutor's Office with Lanzarote, by express decision of the new chief prosecutor of Las Palmas. "It was my designation. Among the colleagues who were there, he seemed to me the most suitable person to handle those matters," Guillermo García-Panasco told La Voz. Of the eight prosecutors on the island, none had a "previous specialization", and García Panasco maintains that Stampa "has collaborated in some specific matter related to this matter and it seemed to me that he had shown not only capacity, but also a certain interest".
Until now, in addition to his collaboration with environmental issues, Ignacio Stampa has led several jury trials for crimes such as the one in Cuatro Esquinas, the one in La Rocar and the one in Calle Paz Peraza, and represented the Public Prosecutor's Office in the trial against the businessman Ramón Rodríguez for attempted homicide, in the case of the "coca sailboat" and, among others, in the trial against two national police officers, who were sentenced to eight and a half years in prison for all the events surrounding the illegal detention of an African in Arrecife.
Now, Ignacio Stampa specializes in environmental crimes and, although he confirms the news of his appointment and assures that he has "a very important professional challenge" ahead, he does not want to make statements on the subject, since "there is a spokesperson for the section for that".
