The mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, may be sentenced to 19 years of disqualification from holding public office, in addition to fines, due to two legal cases brought against him that will be settled in separate criminal trials. The Special Prosecutor for the Environment of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has found sufficient evidence to consider that Reyes has engaged in urban malfeasance and continued crime against territorial planning, due to the granting of construction licenses on rustic land. This will be the first time that the southern mayor is prosecuted criminally and based on a complaint from the Public Prosecutor, since although he has been involved in a criminal process on other occasions - such as in the famous case of the wall - these were preliminary proceedings and based on complaints from individuals. This time, on the contrary, he must submit to two oral trials at the request of the Prosecutor's Office.
If the legal situation facing José Francisco Reyes is extremely delicate, it is no less so for three municipal technicians, included in the same request for conviction for having participated in the process of granting these licenses, and the Prosecutor's Office even requests for one of them, in addition to disqualification, a sentence of five years in prison. This is the municipal technical architect Pablo Ramón Carrasco Cabrera, whom the Public Prosecutor considers to have incurred in the crime of falsification of a public document and who "deliberately misrepresented the truth."
The crux of the matter in both cases is that the construction licenses in question were granted, as stated by the Prosecutor's Office, on land considered rustic by the Island Planning Plan, but the City Council acted as if the PIO did not exist and based its entire administrative procedure on the Yaiza General Plan of 1973, which considered these plots as developable land. The PIO, obviously, is above any municipal regulations in terms of territorial planning, but the southern Consistory acted as if this island instrument did not even exist.
About to go to oral trial
The possible judicial disqualification for 19 years that Reyes faces comes from an accusation filed by the Prosecutor's Office last June, for which 9 years of disqualification are requested, and another older one, from almost a year ago (August 2005), although it had not transpired at the time, in this case with a request for 10 years of disqualification.
The case whose accusation was filed by the Prosecutor's Office in August of last year is in relation to nine licenses granted by Yaiza to the entity Casas Conejeras S. L. for the construction of homes on a rustic farm of 12,500 square meters, adjacent to the road that connects the towns of Femés and Las Breñas. The Prosecutor's Office considers that both the parceling and the license are irregular, so it is considered that the mayor José Francisco Reyes incurred in a continued crime against territorial planning. This case is about to be taken to oral trial by the Provincial Court of Las Palmas and the secretary of the City Council, Vicente Jesús Bartolomé Fuentes; the municipal technical architect, Pablo Ramón Carrasco Cabrera; and the surveyor Alfredo Morales Armas, for whom 5 years of disqualification are requested, also appear as defendants. A sentence of 5 years in prison is also requested for Carrasco Cabrera.
In the second case, the accusation was filed by the Prosecutor's Office last June, and is related to the authorization of renovation works of a house for its use as a bar restaurant, on García Escámez street in the southern municipality, on rustic land. In this case, the prosecutor considers that Reyes incurred in the crime of urban malfeasance, for which he requests 10 years of disqualification and a fine.
Instead of crops, nine homes with swimming pools
In the case for which the Prosecutor's Office has requested nine years of disqualification for the mayor of Yaiza and five years in prison and the same period of disqualification for the technical architect of the City Council, Pablo Ramón Carrasco Cabrera, the Public Prosecutor who filed the accusation points out that on a rustic farm - that is, non-developable - located between Femés and Las Breñas, "the physical reality of that land was being transformed, so that there ended up being nine single-family homes, no more than two stories, mostly with a swimming pool", and that "the urban parceling of the land and the construction of the nine homes, in parts, were authorized by the Yaiza City Council" between 1999 and 2000. The prosecutor adds that José Francisco Reyes "authorized the gradual parceling, disguised in the form of successive segregation licenses", as well as the construction without the intervention of the Government of the Canary Islands or the Cabildo of Lanzarote, to which he was legally obliged, because it was rustic land.
For his part, the municipal technical architect Carrasco Cabrera favorably reported for the granting of these licenses, and only "limited himself to observing that the plot to be segregated in each case and the parent farm had dimensions that complied with the minimum required, without explaining that this minimum was that of the minimum cultivation area, [...] and this knowing that it was not cultivation but construction" the use for which the owner requested the licenses.
In addition, Carrasco Cabrera declared as a building plot the land for which authorizations were requested, and therefore, urban land for consolidation, and not rustic land, "as it was classified in the current planning", as highlighted by the Public Prosecutor, all this endorsed later by the mayor of Yaiza. This declaration as urban land is what has led the prosecutor to request five years in prison for Carrasco Cabrera, for "falsification of a public document".
This case was processed after the works were reported by agents of the Civil Guard attached to Seprona.
