The Provincial Court of Murcia acquitted on Thursday two former advisers to the Government of Murcia during the mandate of the popular Ramón Luis Valcárcel, and five other former senior officials from his team linked to the development of an urban planning coup on protected natural land near the Mar Menor. After a month of trial and more than fifty testimonies and expert reports, the Court finds no reason to find any of the defendants guilty of the crimes of prevarication and falsification of documents of which they were accused in this case, known as Novo Carthago.
The project, which began in 2002, involved the construction of a macro development with 10,000 homes and two golf courses on land with different environmental protection values. To this end, the Prosecutor’s Office found that the defendants, including the former ministers of the Environment, Antonio Cerdá, and of Public Works, Joaquín Bascuña, irregularly modified the Natural Resources Management Plan (PORN) of the area and the general urban plan of Cartagena, the municipal territory to which the settlement belonged, which was never implemented. However, for the Third Section of the Provincial Court, it was not possible to prove that the administrative decisions taken on these urban planning regulations were “arbitrary” or dictated “consciously of their injustice”, so it cannot be said that there is a crime of abuse.
As regards the former councilor Cerdá, promoter of the modification of the PORN to legalize urban development and for whom the most severe sentences were requested (three and a half years in prison and the same number of years of disqualification), the Court does not appreciate any “obvious administrative illegality” in his actions. The sentence even indicates that his criminal responsibility would have expired, because he had been accused in 2013, more than ten years after these procedures began.
The Court also points out that the protected land within the nearly 600 hectares occupied by the development was only around 44 hectares, so the project’s impact on PORN was “small”. Furthermore, he points out that “there were reasoned technical opinions defending the environmental desirability of amending” that natural resources plan to convert what was then an intensively irrigated area into one for recreational use, such as a golf course. Both the defendants and numerous witnesses stated during the trial that the irrigation was more polluting and harmful to the Mar Menor than the sports facility, so the ruling indicates that “it is not unreasonable to argue that (the accused political leaders) acted with the aim of improving” that situation.
The Court insists that “permitting certain recreational uses in protected spaces is not legally implausible or unlawful per se” and cites as an example ski resorts built in natural spaces and also approved by the courts.
Councilor Cerdá, we read in the text, “acted within the limits of a political decision” and “the absence of a personal or private interest was clear” in the development of Novo Carthago, as well as not having put pressure on any technician to modify the management plan against the legal criteria. The court also acquits the person who was the legal advisor of the councilor and then general director of Environmental Quality, who also participated in the modification of the PORN.
As regards the modification made to the general urban plan of Cartagena, the Court does not find any crime in the actions of the former councilor Bascuñana, who “acted supported by the technical reports”, according to the sentence. The then director, deputy director and legal consultant of Urban Planning also absolves the same reasoning. None of the charges brought against them, according to the sentence, reveal “a negligent act or a bastard will, not even evaluated jointly”, nor has it been demonstrated that this change was made with “the intent to favor particular interests”.
This sentence can only be appealed in cassation before the Supreme Court, since the proceedings began before the 2015 reform of the criminal procedure code.
