Defending legality and decency in a place plagued by corruption is not easy or free. Business expectations linked to urban planning have led to the normalization of mafia-like behaviors by speculators and political accomplices who in Lanzarote, thanks to greater social awareness about the protection of the territory and its small size, are clearly visible and identifiable. In other words, Lanzarote meets the perfect conditions to study the phenomenon of corruption, as demonstrated by the fact that it is a case study in several universities in our country.
We live in a place so small that it is relatively easy to know what the person next to you is doing. What businessmen do, what politicians do, what technicians do, what civil servants do, what judges do, what prosecutors do, what lawyers do, what the media do and what organized civil society does. Anyone who is inside any of those circles knows well what is happening and knows perfectly the nature of the problem we face: the morbid desire of a very powerful minority to maintain their privileges and continue amassing their fortune.
But Lanzarote is special. On this island, the existence of that war that confronts those who think that their money can do everything, including the right of eminent domain over the territory, and those who have tried in some way to combat the corruption inherent in the urban planning business is visible as in few others. It is, in short, the same war that is being fought throughout the planet between wild capitalism (is there any other?) and the interests of the majority of the people.
In recent years, however, the lords of money and their political commercial agents have intensified their efforts to annihilate their adversaries in the media. It's understandable. From their business logic it must be difficult to assimilate that despite all their power they cannot control everyone. They cannot control all the technicians, they cannot control all the journalists, they cannot control all the prosecutors, they cannot control all the politicians and they cannot control all the organized civil society. As much as they try, and they try a lot, they cannot, and that is why they continue to raise the volume of public disqualification of those who do not comply with their interests. The mafia in Lanzarote does not use guns, but shoots lies through its media with the same purpose as bullets: to annihilate anyone who puts their business at risk.
It was difficult to name Manrique Favorite Son and he was shamelessly insulted by Dimas Martín, just as the former mayor of Yaiza, José Francisco Reyes, insulted José Saramago when the Nobel Prize winner for Literature said that he would not go to Playa Blanca again after seeing the urban excesses perpetrated in the south. Judge César Romero Pamparacuatro and prosecutor Ignacio Stampa have been and continue to be attacked in a miserable way for persecuting the same criminals who finance their media hunt. Esteban Armas and Leopoldo Díaz were removed from their positions in the Island Plan office because their rigorous work was an obstacle for a local businessman addicted to building hotels and wineries without a license, and the complete list of victims and collateral damage from the territory war would be endless. The latest target in the sights of the local Camorra snipers is the lawyer Agustín Domingo Acosta, accused of charging 900,000 euros for his fourteen years of service to the Cabildo. These are his crimes.
In 2006, he defended and won for the Cabildo of Lanzarote the reimbursement of management expenses and the compensation of the Tax on Production and Imports in the Canary Islands (APIC). This case alone meant an income for the Cabildo of Lanzarote of more than five times the total expenditure on the services contracted during the fourteen years to the lawyer. In addition, the aforementioned judgments meant that the Government of the Canary Islands was forced to pay all the Cabildos more than 45 million euros.
He was the lawyer of the Cabildo in the lawsuits filed by the Cabildo against the granting of licenses for tourist use. All appeals were won, both in the first instance and on appeal and cassation, with more than 50 judgments in favor of the Cabildo, which annulled illegally granted licenses and authorized tens of thousands of tourist beds and the development of urbanizations and partial plans in violation of the law.
The legal actions undertaken by the Cabildo not only allowed the annulment of more than 12,000 tourist beds, but also achieved the annulment of the licenses granted by the Yaiza City Council in 2006 and 2007 to build a macro-project of 4,397 places in 1,012 homes, 220 commercial premises and 2,590 parking spaces in a piece of land, Costa Roja, located north of Playa Blanca, which did not even have a partial plan.
Thanks to all those favorable judgments, the supremacy of the PIOT over the old municipal partial or general plans was declared, it was warned that licenses cannot be granted against the island model of sustainable development, the extensions of old licenses were annulled and the town councils were forced to comply with the island planning that we had all given ourselves and to request a report from the Cabildo before authorizing works on land not adapted to the PIOT.
But the work of Agustín Domingo Acosta as a jurist of the Cabildo does not end there, which would already be important. He also defended the Corporation in multiple criminal proceedings and directed the defense of the entity in ten judicial proceedings on patrimonial responsibility in which the Cabildo was claimed more than 3.7 million euros in compensation for various claims, which concluded with a favorable result for the Corporation. In addition, he exercised the defense in twenty judicial proceedings in the field of historical heritage, nineteen of which concluded with a favorable result for the Cabildo of Lanzarote. He also defended the entity in another thirty matters in the field of local government, tourist planning or the environment, as well as in multiple appeals on public function, sanctions and authorizations in the field of land transport, the vast majority of which concluded with favorable results for the Cabildo. In short, we are probably facing the best defender that the Cabildo has had in the courts in its entire history, in very complex and diverse areas.
In a normal country, on a normal island, a professional with this record would be treated with the utmost respect and the gratitude that an invaluable work deserves from the point of view of the environmental and economic sustainability of the island. Perhaps for this reason, those who are more concerned with doing their homework in front of the local chieftains than in recognizing the work of their best professionals, intend to include Acosta in their obscene conspiracy theories. The presentation of accumulated data on the payment of legal services for fourteen years, as Pedro San Ginés does, hiding its entity and its result, constitutes a distortion of reality only understandable from the obsession of the president of the Cabildo to silence critical voices and persecute those who do not satisfy the hunger of cannibalistic urbanism. Suffice it to say just two facts to reveal how petty the use of figures is. One: dividing the total amount charged by this lawyer in the fourteen years of service, we would get the annual equivalent of what an island director of Territorial Planning or a CEO of the Tourist Centers charges, around 60,000 euros per year. And two: Only in 2005 the Cabildo spent 1 million euros on local advertising and propaganda, more than double the entire cost of urban planning lawsuits in a decade. In fact, that same year, the Cabildo paid the Lancelot group about 400,000 euros in various advertising services (more than the entire amount of all urban planning lawsuits). How much does that amount between 1997 and 2015, the same period that is used to add up the fees of Agustín Domingo? Millionaires at the expense of the Cabildo? Why does the president of the Cabildo dedicate himself to shooting at those whom the speculators have put in their sights?
Carlos Meca, Councilor of Podemos in the Cabildo of Lanzarote