The trial for the granting of licenses to two companies linked to Pedro de Armas to build 66 villas in the Playa Blanca Partial Plan in 2005 has been seen for sentencing this Thursday and has once again brought to the table one of the axes around which almost all urban crime cases in this municipality revolve. That is, the granting of licenses by the mayor with the "coverage" of alleged legal and technical reports that did not really pronounce on the substance of the matter and that did not even end with a conclusion in favor or against.
In fact, the former secretary of the City Council, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, has even stated during the trial that he did not even see the files and that the reports he issued were actually standard "templates" that he was using. "It has been customary not to pass the files to the secretary. They passed me the signed resolutions", Bartolomé Fuentes has assured, for whom the Prosecutor's Office is asking for two years in prison and 10 years of disqualification for a continued crime of urban prevarication. The same penalty is requested for the head of the Technical Office, Antonio Lorenzo, and for the former mayor, José Francisco Reyes, who has refused to testify during the trial.
For his part, Lorenzo has appealed to his "lack of knowledge" at that time, even on how he should issue the reports. "Now I know the regulations, but at that time I didn't", the still head of the Technical Office responded, when the prosecutor asked him how he could issue reports that "did not even allude to the technical elements that he should analyze", nor did they end up concluding whether the technical pronouncement was in favor or against the granting.
"They were always done like that, nobody told me anything, nobody asked me to clarify anything... I was absolutely convinced that they were well done", Lorenzo has stated, who has admitted that now "he would have done that report in another way, much more motivated", and that "at that moment he was absolutely convinced that it was urban land".
Technical report, legal report and license granting in one day
As for Bartolomé Fuentes, he has defended that in his reports as a lawyer he only reported on the procedure that should be followed to grant the license. "I did not report favorably, not at all", he has assured. In fact, he has insisted that in that writing "he ended up saying that reports should be requested" -including one of compatibility with the PIOT to the Cabildo-, and that "if they were not incorporated or were not favorable, the secretary's should be understood as negative".
However, as has been highlighted during the trial, no procedure was carried out afterwards. In fact, on the same day, Lorenzo's technical report, that alleged legal report from the secretary, the mayor's resolution authorizing the license and the notification to the interested party are recorded as having been issued, without Bartolomé Fuentes raising any objection.
"As secretary, don't you cry out to heaven in the face of these irregularities?", the prosecutor has asked him, stressing that he also had the duty to warn if mandatory reports were missing. "I believe I fulfilled my duty", the former secretary has responded, who in 2013 was removed from his position by another conviction for a crime of urban prevarication.
"Does it seem normal to you that the technical report, the legal report and the resolution granting the license are issued on the same day?", the prosecutor has asked the head of the Technical Office. "No", he has responded. "But it can be done", he added then.
Up to seven warnings from the judge to Bartolomé Fuentes
The most tense interrogation during the trial has been that of Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, who has been warned up to seven times by the judge while prosecutor Elena Herrera was asking him questions. "Answer the question", "I direct the debates here" and "answer what you are being asked, or if you don't want to, say you don't want to answer", are some of the phrases that Magistrate Margarita Gómez Martín has dedicated to him, each time the accused began to refer to other facts, reports or episodes that had nothing to do with the question. "You are giving us a rally", the prosecutor has retorted to the former secretary.
And it is that although Bartolomé Fuentes has maintained that he did not report favorably to those licenses, at the same time he has based a good part of his defense on trying to defend the granting of those permits, which were granted in a partial plan that had already been extinguished since the entry into force of the Canary Islands Urgent Measures Law of 2001. Therefore, that plan could not be developed, as the courts later ruled and as both the Cabildo of Lanzarote and the Government of the Canary Islands were warning the City Council at that time. However, the City Council continued to approve the urbanization project and then grant licenses to different developers. And all this despite the fact that, in addition, the Cabildo had suspended that plan for two years. And also despite the fact that it had to have been adapted to the Island Plan of 2010, for which it had a period of six months, and it never did, nor had it published the rules of that plan in time, as was required for it to be really in force.
To defend their position, the defendants have provided a single expert, the lawyer Ignacio Díaz de Aguilar, who has been harshly questioned by both the Prosecutor's Office and the popular accusation, represented by Urban Transparency. And it is that as Díaz de Aguilar himself has admitted, he is directly linked to that partial plan. On the one hand, because he represented the Compensation Board. On the other hand, because his brother is one of the promoters, and in addition to the kinship, they are united by several companies in which they are or have been associated. But in addition, a third brother has intervened in that partial plan as an architect and another has acquired properties in it.
"I don't know if I explain myself, because it's always a small mess"
Although his validity as an expert has been questioned by the prosecution, Díaz de Aguilar has declared by videoconference to ratify a report that he prepared in 2004, defending the validity of the Playa Blanca Partial Plan, which was later annulled by the courts. "I don't know if I explain myself, because it's always a small mess", the lawyer has pointed out at one point in his intervention, after referring to different regulations and procedures to defend a plan that, ultimately, the courts have already declared null (although he has stressed that after the approval of the new General Plan of Yaiza, it is now "perfectly legalized").
"We are debating something that the contentious jurisdiction has already ruled on. I don't understand the meaning of this debate", the prosecutor has pointed out in her conclusions, who has provided four different experts during the trial: two who were then in the PIOT Office of the Cabildo, Leopoldo Díaz and Esteban Armas, and two from the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment of the Government of the Canary Islands.
The former have confirmed that in the case of one of the two licenses being tried, the City Council did not even request a compatibility report from the Cabildo and learned of its granting "afterwards". In the other, the report was requested and it was negative, but by then Reyes had already granted the license. In addition, they have recalled that at that time the Cabildo had to go to court, because the City Council was hiding the licenses it granted, until the Justice forced it to notify them. And they have also recalled that the institution appealed all the acts related to the Playa Blanca Plan, always obtaining judgments that gave it the reason and confirmed that that plan was null.
"No report complies. It was something generic"
For their part, the experts from the Apmun have pointed out that the reports from Antonio Lorenzo and Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes that were provided to the file for granting those licenses "do not comply with the requirements established by the regulations", and also that the secretary was "responsible for warning of the omission of mandatory reports". "None comply. It was something generic. They reported in a generic, not detailed way", one of the experts has pointed out, endorsing the thesis that the Prosecutor's Office has been maintaining for years in this and other cases of urban corruption in Yaiza, including the Yate case, which is pending trial and has been repeatedly named during this hearing.
In addition, the experts have also confirmed that the Apmun in its day expressly requested information from both the mayor and the secretary about this partial plan, after the entry into force of the Urgent Measures Law, "and there is no record of a response". And to the request of the Apmun is added the one made by the Cabildo itself, as the experts of the Island Corporation have also recalled. Specifically, the institution sent a certified letter to the City Council in 2004, so that it would annul or leave without effect the urbanization project that it had just approved for this partial plan, warning it that it was extinguished. In the case of Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, he has confirmed that he knew of the existence of that letter. In the case of Antonio Lorenzo, he has assured that he had no knowledge of it at the time and that he had not seen it until now, when he has "studied" the facts after being charged in this criminal case, "to see what was happening here".
