Next Saturday will be a key day to settle or not the La Cueva lawsuit and also for the future of the Haría government pact between the PSOE and CC. The mayor, Alfredo Villalba, has called two plenary sessions for that day. In the first, at 9 in the morning, he will try to approve the agreement reached with the Cabildo to execute the sentence of La Cueva de Los Verdes, which condemned the Island Corporation to pay a millionaire compensation to the Town Hall.
That vote will test its alliance with Coalición Canaria, which has already publicly rejected the agreement because it considers it “a disloyalty” to the agreement signed in its day by two of its party colleagues, the former president of the Cabildo, Pedro San Ginés, and the former mayor of Haría, Marci Acuña. If the CC councilors abstained, it could still prosper; but if they voted against, everything would depend on the votes of the Municipal Platform of Haría of José Torres Stinga, who was the one who initiated that lawsuit when he was mayor for CC.
Given the possibility that the Plenary finally rejects that agreement, which involves the payment of almost 13 million euros to the City Council in 15 years, the mayor has called a second plenary session. With it, he intends to initiate the procedures to invalidate the agreement signed in 2016, starting by declaring its “harmfulness” for the Town Hall, and then urge the execution of the sentence in court.
For this, he has legal reports that warn of this harmfulness, since the agreement did not even expressly include compensation to the Town Hall, which is what the sentence established. The only thing it raised, according to these reports, was a “declaration of intentions” by the Cabildo, to make investments of 6 million euros in Haría in 10 years, but clarifying that it would do so "to the extent of its possibilities".
Now, the new agreement has been proposed as an addendum to that agreement, precisely to include what was not included at the time, which is the compensation that corresponds to the City Council. And that is precisely what Coalición Canaria opposes, which criticizes that terms such as “execution of sentence”, “compensation” and “interests” have been included in the document. In this regard, he insists that the lawsuit was closed based on that extrajudicial agreement. However, the reality is that the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands did issue a final judgment, ratifying the conviction issued in the first instance against the Cabildo, then presided over by San Ginés.
That is the part that CC refuses to recognize in the new agreement, despite the municipal reports that conclude that the previous agreement was harmful to the Town Hall, which was signed without requesting an economic opinion and that has not even been validated or approved by the courts.
In the event that the councilors of Coalición Canaria finally decide to vote against the agreement, the crisis opened in the municipal government could reach a critical situation. In fact, for weeks there has been speculation about a possible motion of censure and CC does not deny that they have held conversations with Torres Stinga's party.
However, beyond the government pacts that could be being negotiated, the position of the Haría Platform will be especially complicated on Saturday. And it is that even if they brandished arguments to vote against the new agreement, it would be more difficult to justify that in the second plenary session they did not vote in favor of declaring the harmfulness of the agreement signed in their day by San Ginés and Marci Acuña, since Torres Stinga criticized it with equal or greater vehemence than the PSOE, for considering it harmful to the City Council.