Two years in prison and 10 years of disqualification. That is the penalty requested by the Prosecutor's Office for the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, for the former secretary of the City Council, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, and for the still head of the Technical Office, Antonio Lorenzo, for the licenses granted to Pedro de Armas in the Playa Blanca Partial Plan.
The three face the same sentence request, for a continued crime of urban planning prevarication. According to the indictment of prosecutor Ignacio Stampa, all acted "with full awareness" that the licenses "lacked all legal protection and were only intended to satisfy the interests of the promoters, to the detriment of the rest of the citizens of the island of Lanzarote".
In total, Reyes authorized the construction of 66 villas, granting two licenses to different developers for this purpose. However, the two plots where the construction was authorized belonged to or had belonged to Pedro de Armas. In one of the cases, the license was granted directly to De Armas' company, Marivista Lanzarote SL. In the other, the license was granted to Villas Blancas Lanzarote SL, just after passing through the hands of José Francisco Reyes' party colleague.
De Armas earned 800,000 euros "in one day"
In the case of that second plot, Pedro de Armas bought and sold it on the same day, earning 800,000 euros "in a moment" and "without leaving the notary's office". This was revealed by another legal case that remains open against De Armas for alleged money laundering. According to that investigation, the representatives of the three companies went together to the notary's office, where Pedro de Armas formalized the purchase and then the sale.
A report by the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (Udef), carried out within that other open case against De Armas, maintains that the previous owner of those two plots, the company Xinxol SL, had been trying to build for almost two decades, without the City Council authorizing it. However, the Consistory changed the criteria after Pedro de Armas acquired those plots. In both cases, the licenses were granted in a plan that was extinct and where it was not possible to build, as the Cabildo of Lanzarote and different political parties, associations and environmental groups had been warning.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the former mayor granted the permits despite being aware of their illegality. As for the secretary and the head of the Technical Office, he considers that they issued reports "with the intention of giving the appearance of legal correctness to the entire administrative procedure" and "deliberately" giving José Francisco Reyes the "coverage to justify the granting" of the licenses.
Warnings from the Cabildo and the Canarian Government
As happened in other cases, at the time José Francisco Reyes hid those licenses from the Cabildo, to prevent it from appealing them. Furthermore, in the case of those granted to De Armas, Reyes resisted handing them over even when the Court forced him to notify the Island Corporation of all the permits he had granted. When the Cabildo finally became aware of those licenses, it appealed them in the courts, which at the time already ratified the illegality not only of different licenses granted in that Partial Plan, but also of the Plan as a whole.
In its account of the facts, the Environment Prosecutor's Office begins precisely by narrating the chronology of the development of that Partial Plan, from the approval of the urbanization project. Both the secretary and the head of the Technical Office issued favorable reports to that approval, "despite its manifest illegality and decisively contributing to the final dictation of the decree granting the license by the mayor".
As for Reyes, the prosecutor considers that he was also fully aware of the illegality and even so "decided to continue with the development of the Playa Blanca Partial Plan, ignoring the warnings of illegality from the Cabildo and the Canary Islands Government itself, which a year earlier had appealed the approval of the statutes and bases of action of the Compensation Board". In fact, when Reyes granted the licenses to De Armas, the Cabildo had already appealed even the urbanization project of the Partial Plan in the courts.
