The Supreme Court has rejected for processing the appeal filed by the Desurcic company against the judgment handed down by the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands in which it rejected its request to obtain compensation for the damages caused by the definitive stoppage of the works of the Valle de Las Huertas in 2011. The company requested 43.9 million euros from the Santa Cruz City Council for lost profits, as it was unable to continue with the project. With this latest judicial decision, the door to this matter is definitively closed, which prevented decision-making in the environment, so that the urban future of Las Huertas begins to unravel after years of continuous litigation intertwined with the well-known Las Teresitas case. The Municipal Management of Urbanism of Santa Cruz, against which Desurcic directed his claim, will now be able to initiate the administrative procedures necessary to unblock the planning of the land at the back of Las Teresitas beach.
The inadmissibility of the cassation appeal, as stated in the ruling to which DIARIO DE NOTIOS has had access, is due to the “lack of substantiation”, and has determined the imposition of 2,000 euros in procedural costs to the company . As explained to this newspaper the councilor for Urbanism of Santa Cruz, Carlos Tarife, “we are facing very good news for the city because it allows us to begin to take the necessary steps so that the light begins to be seen at the end of the tunnel of the urbanization of Valle de las Huertas ”.
This light that Tarife speaks of, although it recognizes that there is still a long way to go, supposes that the first steps can already be taken to unblock the urban situation. As he explains, “now we will be able to go to the Compensation Board, which brings together all the owners of the land, so that they can carry out the urbanization project of the Las Huertas Valley.” Once this communication has been made, and respecting all the necessary deadlines, “if the project is not executed, then the City Council may enter to do so publicly.”
Desurcic’s claim was dismissed by the TSJC in March of last year, an instance to which the company appealed after its claim was rejected by the Administrative Contentious Court Number 1 of Santa Cruz in 2019. The Canary Islands high court supported its decision in that the compensation project approved in 1989 was annulled by a final judgment of July 13, 2007, without since then a new equidistribution of benefits and burdens has been approved. For the Chamber, the absence of a compensation project from the date of communication of the sentence was a determining factor in the impossibility of continuing with the urbanization works.
In this regard, the TSJC pointed out at the time that “the absence of a compensation project is not alien to the appellant Desurcic, since she is a member of the Compensation Board, the body in charge of preparing said project.”
