The Madrid public prosecutor’s office accuses a senior official at the capital’s town hall and the former government commissioner of Isabel Díaz Ayuso for La Cañada Real of administrative prevarication. He requests a special 10-year ban from public functions related to urban issues for demolishing a house in Sector 6, near the Valdemingómez incinerator, without respecting legal procedures.
One of the people under investigation in this case is the head of the Urban Discipline Department of Madrid City Hall, JCS, who has held this position for 20 years. The other person involved is the former commissioner of the Community of Madrid, MG, who held this position from 2021 until he leaves office in April 2023.
The two people involved decided to “accelerate the eviction and demolition of the land” of the plaintiff, AC, in 2022, without informing him in advance and without giving him a hearing, and “did not even wait for the notification of the resolution of his previous appeal”. for reconsideration of the expulsion order,” according to the prosecutor’s indictment. The demolition took place while the plaintiff was traveling in Morocco.
Taking advantage of the fact that AC was outside his house – assures the Public Prosecutor – the former commissioner sent an email to the highest official of the Town Hall “informing” him that they had “detected ‘l ‘blatant abandonment’ of the land” where the plaintiff resided. In response to this request, the municipal officer sent a notification of an immediate demolition order to the head of the Community at the time of the events. With this, the former commissioner “delegated” the demolition to an external company “without even previously informing, as is usual, the PM (Municipal Police), in order to guarantee the safety of the measure”.
The Public Prosecutor considers that the administration’s argument to justify the demolition of the house, based on the alleged “abandonment” of the property, “was absolutely fallacious”. According to the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office, this thesis “was used exclusively as a fraudulent basis to deviate from the legal procedure for the demolition of the house and to allow its direct execution by the Commissioner of the Community of Madrid, behind the back of the person concerned, by an irregular order addressed by the municipal council to the commissioner himself.
Registered since 2004
The plaintiff had been registered on this land since 2004. In 2020, when the Community began the relocation procedures in Cañada Real, the regional government allocated him a new house in Cobeña, again according to the documentation mentioned in the prosecution’s brief. The tenant of this accommodation rejected this alternative “because the accommodation was too far from his place of work”. Following this decision, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s team “revoked her right to relocation” and informed the City Hall headed by José Luis Martínez Almeida.
In November 2021, the department of the highest investigated municipal official opened an “urban discipline case” against the complainant, who presented allegations to the resolution of eviction from his house and subsequent demolition. The municipal proposal became a resolution that the plaintiff appealed.
“For a reason that is not recorded, the Commissioner of the Community of Madrid for the Cañada Real, the accused MG and JCS decided to accelerate the eviction and demolition of the land AC, taking into account the use that he was doing. “. of the legal resources at its disposal, within the framework of the legal procedure”, underlines the prosecutor, in a letter published in July and which has just been accessed by the private prosecution, led by the lawyer Carlos Castillo, of the Center for Advice. and social studies (CAES).
Along the same lines, the public prosecutor also claims that “in order to streamline” the “judicial procedure and obtain the rapid execution of the demolition, the defendants agreed to develop a strategy that would cover a departure from the guarantees legal provisions mentioned above. and follow the de facto route. And he adds that for this they took advantage of the fact that the accused “was in Morocco in July 2022”.
In July, the 20th Investigating Court of Madrid indicted the two defendants for the alleged crime of prevarication. The judge ordered the procedure to be transformed into an abbreviated procedure and opened the deadline for the prosecution and the private prosecutor’s office to present their charging documents. The sources consulted close to the case assure that this decision has been the subject of an appeal.
The Community and Rivas, condemned
elDiario.es tried to obtain the version of those surveyed. The Town Hall assures that this procedure “is a personal matter of the official”. For their part, sources close to the former commissioner assure that the accusation is “absurd” and that the institution he represented at the time did not have the authority to carry out the demolitions.
AC’s complaint is not the only legal case opened for demolition in Cañada Real. In September, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid condemned the regional government and the Rivas Vaciamadrid City Hall for another demolition in this same area, even though in this case the plaintiff was a resident of the gypsy ethnic group, defended by the Secretariado Gitano, who resided in sector 4.
Once again, the magistrates explain that in this decision there was no “administrative file” nor “administrative act” determining the demolition of unsanitary housing. In this case, the Court concluded that the plaintiff’s “fundamental right to privacy and the inviolability of the home” had been “violated.” It is for this reason that they ordered the two administrations to jointly pay compensation of 15,000 euros.
