The State Attorney General's Office has officially confirmed that it has completed "Operation Yate", also known as the "Reyes" case, which investigates urban crimes in the municipality of Yaiza. In a statement, the Prosecutor's Office makes public that on December 20 it sent a letter to the Court investigating the case requesting that the abbreviated procedure be initiated, prior to the holding of the oral trial.
In addition, the Prosecutor's Office has announced that it will bring charges against twelve people, against whom "high indications of criminality" have been found. Until now, thirteen people remained charged in the procedure, so one of them will be left out of the case.
Until now, the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, the secretary, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, and three other technicians from the Consistory, as well as Reyes' wife and three children, for money laundering, remained charged. Along with them, Simeón Camacho, Antonio Marcelo Machín, Benito Mesa Ferrer and Rafael Mesa Ferrer are also charged, for their alleged collaboration in carrying out said laundering, through the companies Acuimar Cachazo and Sea Sun Lanzarote.
Among the crimes that are imputed are those of urban planning prevarication, bribery, money laundering, activities and negotiations prohibited to public officials, embezzlement of public funds and falsification of commercial documents.
"A plan to get rich"
The Prosecutor's Office considers, "after carrying out a laborious investigation", that José Francisco Reyes, "acting from his position as mayor, devised a plan to get rich during the exercise of his position, abusing the situation of power he held in the urban area of the town of Yaiza".
The chief prosecutor of the Environment and Urbanism in Las Palmas, Javier Ródenas, and the prosecutor in Lanzarote of the Environment section Ignacio Stampa, who has led this investigation since its inception, detail in the letter sent to the Court how the accused "managed to illegally collect a significant amount of money derived from the massive granting of urban licenses that as Mayor-President of the Yaiza City Council was selectively granting during his term, causing the birth of an à la carte urbanism that led to a total alteration of the urban reality of the municipality of Yaiza, thus managing to obtain an unjustified enrichment that reaches the minimum amount of one million euros".
The prosecutors detail the indications that reveal that the origin of the assets that he managed to amass during his time as mayor of the Yaiza City Council, "in no case can be linked to or comes from his known income, nor is it justified by the payments he legitimately received as mayor, but rather has been acquired as a direct consequence of his criminal municipal policy established in the criminal granting of urban licenses".
Frontmen and "large investments"
To try to legitimize the benefits obtained during those years, according to the Prosecutor's Office's writing, "the former Mayor of Yaiza used different procedures such as the use of frontmen, cash amortization of a considerable number of bank loans and insurance, splitting of cash operations of unknown origin and, above all, large movable and immovable investments paid with cash and constant income of other many and large amounts of cash, in a multiplicity of instrumental current accounts, as well as the creation of interposed companies as shell companies".
The prosecutors conclude that there are "clear indications that an absolutely essential step in the administrative procedures for granting urban licenses was grossly dispensed with, aimed at asserting and ensuring compliance with the insular interests that the Island Council of Lanzarote legally protects", and that "it deliberately omitted unavoidable requirements such as the lack of legal reports and the tourist authorization on which the validity of the municipal authorization depended".
"Unbridled" growth that affects basic services
In addition, the Prosecutor's Office emphasizes that by authorizing "unbridled thousands of tourist beds against the determinations of the Cabildo itself", the necessary control of growth was prevented, aimed at avoiding an "uncontrolled" development and that "basic services of the Island of Lanzarote could be affected", such as water and electricity. In this sense, the Public Prosecutor's Office points out that "an excess of tourist beds and buildability beyond the planned limits entails restrictions on basic services that cannot cover the exorbitant tourist areas approved by the aforementioned mayor".
During the Instruction, carried out in coordination with the Provincial Brigade of the Judicial Police, UDYCO Section, the Prosecutor's Office recalls that "about thirty files for granting licenses for the construction of hotel complexes have been analyzed with an evident incriminating sign". This list includes the administrative files for the construction of the Meliá Volcán hotel, the Princesa Yaiza hotel, the Papagayo Arenas hotel, the Dream Gran Castillo hotel, the Iberostar la Bocayna apartments, the Iberostar Papagayo Park apartments, the Río Playa Blanca apartments, the Son Bou hotel, the Rubicón Palace hotel, the Iberostar Papagayo hotel, the Hesperia Puerto Calero hotel, the Coloradamar apartments on plot 12 partial plan las coloradas, the Cay Beach papagayo apartments on plot 14 partial plan las coloradas, the Natura Palace hotel on plot 45 and 46 partial plan montaña roja.
"Manifest and blatant illegality"
In addition to hotel licenses, the administrative files for granting a building permit to the entity "Puerto Deportivo Marina Rubicón, S.A." and the administrative file for the approval of the Playa Blanca Partial Plan have also been analyzed in the case.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, in all these files, the former mayor "granted the licenses between 1998 and 2003 knowing of their manifest and blatant illegality". In addition, he emphasizes that these licenses "at least indicatively violate the agreements to suspend the granting of licenses adopted by the Cabildo during the Revision of the PIOT (1998-2000), and were granted by a municipal body that at that time had suspended the power to grant them and, what is more serious, were granted with full knowledge of the violation of the legality that they were going to commit with the granting of these licenses, knowing, in addition, that they authorized tourist buildings incompatible with the Island Planning (sometimes even incompatible with the ordinances of the Partial Plan itself) and with the postulates introduced in the revision in process (which is what was intended to be safeguarded), without taking into account the building load of the Island".