The PSOE of Lanzarote has accused the president of the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Oswaldo Betancort (Coalición Canaria) of having lost up to 20 million euros from the Integrated Action Plan, known as Plan Edil, co-financed with ERDF funds, due to “incompetence, lack of rigor, and a mistaken interpretation of the call for applications.”
The spokesperson for the Socialist Group in the Cabildo of Lanzarote, Ariagona González, has pointed out that the island government "tried to turn into a grievance for Lanzarote what was actually its own error, warned and not corrected".
“It wasn’t Madrid, it wasn’t a rigged decision, and it wasn’t an attack on Lanzarote’s dignity,” González has defended. The socialist spokesperson indicated that it was the Cabildo who “did not correctly interpret the bases, who applied for a category that did not correspond to them, and who, when asked to correct the application, decided to insist on a mistaken thesis that has ended up leaving the island out of key funding,” González stated.
The PSOE accuses Oswaldo Betancort of making the mistake
The socialist spokesperson recalled that the Cabildo itself initially presented the provisional inadmissibility of the Integrated Action Plan as a matter of "dignity" and defense of Lanzarote's opportunities. However, according to González, "the reality is much more serious and much simpler: the error was Oswaldo Betancort's Government."
According to what has been explained by the opposition party, the bases of the call established different categories of beneficiaries, among them large cities, intermediate cities, and functional urban areas. The Cabildo de Lanzarote applied as a large city, despite the fact that to do so a supramunicipal entity had to be accompanied by at least one municipality of more than 75,000 inhabitants. "And in Lanzarote there is no municipality of more than 75,000 inhabitants. Everyone understood it except the Cabildo de Lanzarote," he/she has pointed out.
Ariagona González has underlined that the Cabildo could have correctly competed in other categories, accompanied by municipalities such as Arrecife, Teguise or Tías, or through a functional urban area together with other town councils on the island. “There were possible paths. What there was not was the right to invent a category that did not correspond in order to later blame others for the failure,” she added.
"Enormous damage to Lanzarote"
The socialist spokesperson insisted that "the most serious thing" was not only the initial error, but that the Directorate-General for European Funds required the Cabildo to "correct the documentation and expressly indicated that, to opt for the category of large city, at least one of the member municipalities must exceed 75,000 inhabitants".
“They were notified, they were told what the problem was, and they were given the opportunity to review the application. But instead of correcting it, the Betancort Government decided to start giving lessons on the territorial organization of the State. That was the level of arrogance and improvisation,” González criticized.
For the PSOE, the loss of these funds represents "enormous damage" for Lanzarote and La Graciosa, because it was financing that could be allocated to transformative projects for the municipalities and for the citizens.
“We are talking about 20 million euros. Not an anecdote or a minor procedure. Lanzarote has lost a key opportunity because its president and its government did not do their job well,” the spokesperson remarked.
González has also accused Betancort of trying to hide his responsibility behind a victimist discourse. “Now we understand why they were not reporting on the outcome of the appeal. It was not prudence, it was shame. They wanted to hide that the appeal did not correct the underlying problem, but rather insisted on the same error that had left us out,” he stated.
The socialist spokesperson has demanded political responsibilities from the president of the Cabildo and his vice president responsible for Project Planning.
Finally, he indicated that “Betancort must stop hiding his incompetence behind grievance speeches", since "Lanzarote does not need a president who blames others every time he makes a mistake", but rather "a serious, solvent government capable of reading the rules before putting 20 million euros at risk”, he concluded.
