More than eight years after a municipal report warned of the illegal occupation of public green areas in the Costa Papagayo Partial Plan of Playa Blanca and four after the City Council initiated the procedures to recover that land, the City Council will take this Thursday to the Plenary the eviction of the plot that the businessman Juan Francisco Rosa occupied with the Kikoland.
The procedure is directed against the company Hotel Princesa Yaiza SL, which extended its facilities creating that private children's and sports area on public land, and against Infond SA, owner of the Hotel Hesperia Playa Dorada. This second establishment, located next to Rosa's illegal hotel, also occupied a part of the land that belongs to the City Council, in this case installing a mini-golf. Now, both companies must leave that land “and the existing facilities” on it, so that they can be recovered as green areas for public use.
Once the forced eviction is approved in the Plenary, the City Council will give these companies 30 days to carry out the eviction voluntarily, as announced months ago by the mayor, Óscar Noda. If they continue to fail to comply with the order, the matter should return to the Plenary and seven days later, the City Council could access the plot. However, according to Noda, the property could try to present allegations or appeals again, which would continue to delay the recovery of that land.
Three judicial instances have endorsed the eviction
The Yaiza City Council declared the agreement that allowed the occupation of that land null and void in December 2016, among other things because it was signed - in 2004 - without a single legal or technical report and without processing any type of file. After that first plenary agreement, Rosa went to the Courts, which confirmed the illegality of the agreement and endorsed the decision adopted by the City Council.
First it was kithe Court of Contentious-Administrative Number 3 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in April 2018. Later, before the new appeal of the businessman, that sentence was ratified by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands in December of that same year. Finally, Rosa appealed to the Supreme Court, which in November 2019 agreed not even admit his appeal for processing, thus rejecting his last attempt to avoid eviction.
Free transfer for 50 years and without reports
Under the agreement signed in 2004, under the Mayoralty of José Francisco Reyes, the City Council freely ceded three plots of 30,000 square meters for 50 years, without even establishing the payment of a fee. One of those plots is occupied by the Kikoland, another by a mini-golf course at the Playa Dorada hotel, and the third, located between the Princesa Yaiza and the Papagayo shopping center, has not yet been given any use.
“It is not only the absence of legal, technical or fiscal reports, but also the slightest procedure for the achievement of the agreement,” stated the ruling that confirmed the illegality of that agreement. In addition, the ruling reproduced a good part of the opinion issued by the Advisory Council at the request of the Yaiza City Council, which commissioned a report before taking the annulment of the agreement to the Plenary.
That opinion, on the one hand, concluded that the agreement was approved in its day with an “absolute omission of the procedure”, since not even a report from the Secretariat or the Technical Office assessing the legality of the agreement was drawn up. But in addition, it warned that rights were granted to the company “without meeting the essential requirements for it.”
Among the numerous reasons for nullity of that agreement, the legal reports questioned that a clause had been included allowing the transfer to be extended beyond the 50 years initially planned, also establishing that at that time preferential treatment would be given to Rosa's company if it was put out to tender. Similarly, it concluded that allowing “a private company the private use of public green areas violates the legal system.”
Criminal case against Reyes and Rosa for the agreement
In addition to this procedure to annul the agreement and recover that public land, the occupation of this space is also being investigated in criminal proceedings, in a case opened following a complaint filed by the former councilors of Podemos in the Cabildo, Carlos Meca, Pablo Ramírez and Griselda Martínez.
Within these proceedings, the businessmen Juan Francisco Rosa and Juan Luis Lorenzo, the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, and the one who was secretary of the City Council, Vicente Bartolomé Fuentes, have already been charged. Both Reyes and Bartolomé Fuentes have already been convicted in other cases for having granted illegal licenses to Rosa, and have even confessed to having done so knowingly and, in the case of the former mayor, in exchange for bribes.
In this criminal procedure, the Public Prosecutor's Office opposed a request from Rosa asking for the case to be dismissed, since it indicated that there are indications to continue investigating and even to determine if there are more people to whom “criminal responsibility can be demanded.”
