The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has annulled the two urban planning licenses that the mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, granted on June 1, 1998 and February 17, 2000 to Las Coloradas S. A. for the construction of a complex of 28 bungalows on plot 17 of the Las Coloradas Plan, in Playa Blanca. These bungalows were already built when Reyes granted the licenses.
The TSJC has exposed four reasons for annulment. According to the Court's ruling, the annulled licenses were not only granted by the mayor of Yaiza "with clear omission of the prior and mandatory report of compatibility of the project with the Island Plan, but were based on legal and technical reports that cannot be considered as such due to their lack of minimum content". It has also been alleged that the publication of the Las Coloradas Partial Plan in 2005, after the granting of the licenses, does not serve to validate them.
These technical and legal reports included in the file "violate the essential requirements that must govern the procedure for granting licenses" established in the legislation. The reports were issued on the same day that the license was granted to the basic project, in June 1998, four days before the first agreement to suspend licenses adopted by the Cabildo in the processing of the Island moratorium came into effect, according to the Chamber, to "compare the presented project with the planning of the municipality and exercise urban control by examining whether or not it is appropriate to authorize or allow the work that is intended to be executed". In this sense, the Court affirms that "the reports are vague and imprecise, given that the technical report does not determine whether the urban non-compliances are remediable or not, and therefore, whether it is favorable or not to the concession".
Therefore, and according to the Superior Court, "the absence of a report violates a rule of mandatory observance in the granting of licenses", especially when the procedure for the authorization of the execution project of the works was initiated in the midst of the process of revision of the Island Plan.
The ruling warns that the Las Coloradas Partial Plan had not been published, and therefore, was not in force and was ineffective. The Court has contradicted the arguments of the Yaiza City Council on the effects of the subsequent publication of the Plan's ordinances in 2005, denying the subsequent validation of the licenses granted.
This is the second complex whose licenses have been annulled in the Las Coloradas Plan, since previously the license granted on plot 12 of the same Plan was also annulled, in which three judicial proceedings are awaiting judgment, from which their rulings are expected. The Cabildo of Lanzarote explains that it is foreseeable that this ruling will be declared final as no appeal for cassation is possible against it.