SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Dec. 29 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Sacyr company has made the first payment of 3.6 million corresponding to the agreement for the return, together with the interest, of the fee improperly charged to Emmasa, the result of a file initiated in 2018 to determine if the annual payment of 2.3 million of euros that the water company made to the company was guaranteed by a contractual document.
Thus, the return of this fee begins, which was endorsed by the Advisory Council in 2021 and announced by the current government team in January 2021.
The mayor of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, José Manuel Bermúdez, explained in a note that “this is how the commitment made by this government team to act with all available tools to recover the amount wrongly paid to Sacyr is met, which will mean for Emmasa to recover more than 38 million euros in the coming years”.
Bermúdez added that this income “is the first of those that will occur each year until the full debt is covered, plus interest”, and is the result of “a meticulous work by municipal technicians, headed by the General Director of Public Services of the Town Hall, Juan Domingo Cabrera”.
The Councilor for Public Services, Carlos Tarife, has described this news as “a great step to initiate the return of this fee, which is the result of the negotiation with Sacyr for which, in addition to this return, the city has been able to reactivate a historic investment plan to complete the integral water cycle in Santa Cruz de Tenerife”.
Said plan, he explained, will be undertaken in two phases, “the first being an action along the entire coast to achieve zero discharge in 2026, and the second a series of large-scale works in the rest of the municipality until 2031, and which will add 40 million euros of investment”.
In January 2021, the City Council announced that the Advisory Council had agreed with the consistory when considering that said fee, charged by Sacyr to Emmasa since 2006, was not legally supported by any contractual document, a conclusion reached by the report municipal started in 2018.
From that moment on, instructions were given to the legal services and to Emmasa itself to initiate the pertinent procedures for the recovery of the total amount, plus interest, which concluded in July 2022 with the announcement of the agreement with the company Sacyr.
40 MILLION INVESTMENT PROGRAM
This agreement not only included the return of said fee, but also the promotion of an investment program amounting to 40 million euros until 2031 divided into two phases.
The first one involves an investment of 8 million euros until 2025 so that all the discharge points in the capital, centered on Taganana, San Andrés and Añaza/Acorán and which already have authorizations from the Government of the Canary Islands, improve their benefits and allow Santa Cruz de Tenerife to be a ‘zero discharge’ municipality on that date.
The second phase will involve the investment of around more than 32 million euros in an infrastructure plan related to the integral water cycle whose detailed content will be known in the first months of 2023, and which will be developed until the end of the current contract. of water management in the municipality, in the year 2031.
