The mayor warns about "how worried" some members of the Popular Party list in Tías are because "they will have to go to court", according to the mayor, "to explain how much they know about the processing of domain files." A topic that José Juan Cruz has refused to explain clearly, concluding that "the City Council has those files and we are going to offer advice to those affected. I'll leave it there."
The PP candidate from Tías, José Francisco Hernández García has already requested the "immediate resignation" of José Alberto Reyes de León as Secretary of Organization of the PSOE in Tías, his current position, for being "an authentic disgrace, insult and affront to the people who participate, or aspire to participate, in the management of public life affairs."
Apparently, and according to the Prosecutor's investigations, Reyes de León sent in the summer of 2001, when he was still a councilor of the City Council, an official document to the Agency for the Protection of the Urban and Natural Environment (APMUN) of the Government of the Canary Islands in which he assured that the City Council had already sanctioned the company INDELASA for works carried out in the municipality of Tías without the necessary urban planning license and on rustic land. The Prosecutor affirms that Reyes de León with "this deceptive maneuver" intended that the APMUN not act against the company that had committed the infraction.
The facts
The story goes back to October 2000 when the APMUN opened an administrative file for alleged urban planning infraction against the company "Industriales de la Construcción de Lanzarote, SA" for having installed an aggregate deposit in the area known as Lomo de Piedra Blanca or La Rinconada without a municipal urban planning license and on land classified as Potentially Productive Rustic.
The APMUN determines as sanctioning measures the suspension of the works and their sealing, in addition to requiring the owners of the company to legalize the works within three months requesting the corresponding prior territorial qualification necessary to obtain the urban planning license that would allow them to carry out the works. The Protection Agency also urged the Tías City Council to initiate its corresponding sanctioning file against the company.
Thus, a few days later, the Tías City Council agrees by means of a decree to initiate the administrative sanctioning file to Indelasa and proposes among the sanctions that should be included, "the restoration of the altered physical reality" by the works, that is, that they return everything as they had found it before starting the installation of the aggregate deposit.
Almost a year later, in July 2001, the APMUN instructor in charge of the case requires the Tías City Council to provide information on whether the aggregate deposit had been demolished and "the altered physical reality" had been restored. It is then, on August 25 specifically, when the Councilor for Urban Planning at that time, José Alberto Reyes de León sends a "municipal letter" to the Protection Agency in which he assures that the sanctioning procedure of the City Council had already "ended with the payment of the corresponding sanction" and that "the works object of the investigation had been legalized" in two specific files.
Deceptive maneuver according to the Prosecutor
The Prosecutor understands that with this document José Alberto Reyes de León "notoriously misrepresented the truth" and explains it assuring that the works had not been legalized nor could they have been because they were based on rustic land. In addition, the files in which the works had supposedly been legalized and to which Reyes de León alluded in the municipal letter, were the request to legalize a fence of a farm and a planting of palm trees that "had nothing to do with the works consisting of the aggregate deposit."
The Prosecutor understands that there is "surreptitious manipulation carried out by the accused" and believes that "with this deceptive maneuver" José Alberto Reyes de León intended to make the APMUN see that the City Council had already sanctioned the company, "preventing the sanctioning action of the Agency and the repair of the diminished legal order."
For his part, José Juan Cruz defends that the City Council requested authorization from the Ministry of Territorial Policy for "two licenses on rustic land." One for the fencing of the plot and a planting of palm trees and another for "a water decanter."
The first of the licenses "we granted because the response from Territorial Policy was favorable." The second "we denied it and through Urban Planning Discipline we imposed the corresponding sanction." José Juan Cruz also downplays the matter recalling that "we are not talking about a building" and states that, the until 2003 Councilor for Urban Planning and accused by the Prosecutor, José Alberto Reyes de León continues to be of his total confidence.