The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands has issued a new Ruling, dated January 15, 2008, in which it declares "radically null" the building permit that the mayor of Teguise, Juan Pedro Hernández, granted on July 5, 1999 to the company "Demadu S.L." authorizing the construction of a hotel with 912 rooms on plot 244-F of the Costa Teguise Partial Plan (located at the end of the urbanization, next to the Lanzarote Beach Club complex). In the same judicial resolution, the extension that the City Council granted on June 14, 2002 to the promoter, which already then -and until today- was the company "Milenium Hotels S.L", which had acquired ownership of the previous owner, is also declared "null and void".
The High Court has upheld the appeal filed by the legal services of the Cabildo against said licenses and declares them "null and void", among other reasons, because it was granted in violation of the agreements to suspend licenses (12-11-1998 and 14-1-1999) adopted by the Cabildo during the PIOT Review process, which prevented the granting of licenses for tourist complexes on the island.
Another reason that the Chamber considers determining for the annulment of the license is that it was granted by the mayor of Teguise without having requested from the Cabildo "the prior, mandatory and binding report from the PIOT Office", which constitutes an essential requirement for the granting of licenses in areas of land whose partial plans have not been adapted to the Island Plan, as is the case of Costa Teguise, reiterating once again its already consolidated jurisprudential doctrine that has established the criterion that since the approval of the PIOT in 1991, urban licenses cannot be granted on the island without a favorable report from the Island Council, given the prevalence of island planning over general and partial municipal planning (this legal aspect has been the focus of an intense judicial debate during these eight years between the Cabildo and the town councils of Yaiza and Teguise because the latter disagreed with the predominant and binding value of the Island Plan and gave hundreds of licenses ignoring it, a question that the jurisprudence that has been created as a result of these judicial processes has settled definitively and conclusively in favor of the Cabildo and the island interest versus the purely municipal one).
In this regard, the Superior Court of Justice highlights in the Sixth Basis of the Judgment that without guaranteeing the compatibility of the works project with the Island Plan, it is not possible to grant the urban license because said Cabildo report "is, in addition, a procedure linked to guaranteeing island interests and preventing actions incompatible with the limitations established in the island planning, hierarchically superior to the municipal planning instrument, from being developed".
Therefore, the Chamber declares that "the City Council of Teguise, considering the binding determination of the planning hierarchically superior to the municipal one, should have requested a report from the Cabildo before granting the license".
In addition, the Court enshrines the thesis of the "automatic expiration" of the old building permits granted in the late eighties (during the elaboration of the PIOT) that were not executed for almost a decade and that tried to be extended in the years 1998-2000 (during the revision of the PIOT) to avoid the application of the Island Plan, definitively accepting the thesis maintained by the Cabildo, whose legal services have considered those old licenses extinguished without the need for an express declaration after the entry into force in 1991 of the Island Plan by authorizing projects incompatible with the PIOT, a thesis that the Chamber endorses again, turning it into jurisprudence, which constitutes a new and important success in the fight against fraud in compliance with planning because through extensions of licenses granted in previous decades numerous tourist complexes radically incompatible with the determinations established since 1991 were authorized.
In this case, the appeal filed against the municipal permits prevented the construction of this huge hotel with 912 rooms and more than 1,000 tourist places in Costa Teguise, but it so happens that said project obtained a European subsidy for regional incentives, proposed by the Department of Tourism of the Government of the Canary Islands, for an amount of 4.7 million euros, whose granting appears published in the Official State Gazette of 6-5-2002, number 108, coinciding, precisely, with the processing of the extension to the project, which has also been annulled by the Courts.