The Court of Seville has reduced the sentence imposed on each of the five brothers, co-owners of a farm in Aznalcázar, from three years and five months in prison to one and a half years in prison, who were sentenced last year by the Court of Justice. Penalty number 14 of Seville for crimes against the environment and damage to the public hydraulic domain, committed by extracting from an aquifer that supplies the Doñana National Park approximately double the amount of water whose withdrawal they had authorized for irrigation.
This appears in a ruling issued on September 27 by the Fourth Section of the Provincial Court and released this Monday by the Communication Office of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia, which resolves the appeals filed by the five brothers against the ruling. initial condemnation of the court and that now releases the family from jail.
The Court now partially considers their challenges in the sole sense of “applying the mitigating circumstance of undue delays as highly qualified”, thereby reducing the sentences to one year in prison for the crime against the environment and six months in prison in the case of the crime of damages, that is, a year and a half in prison for each of the accused. In addition, their fines are reduced from 12,000 euros per head to 4,200 euros each.
The initial sentence thus confirmed the “abuse” committed by the accused, with water withdrawals “even exceeding twice what was allowed” and “also notably exceeding the needs of the exploited crops”, putting “the natural system at serious risk.” ” by Doñana.
The Criminal Court number 14 of Seville declared it proven that the five brothers were, as of the date of the events, co-owners of the Hato Blanco Viejo farm, located in Aznalcázar and registered in the Catalog of Private Waters of the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation (CHG). , some land dedicated to rice and cotton crops, with an irrigation authorization, “conditioned on maximum annual volumes.” Specifically, the CHG stipulated “a maximum annual volume of 3,481,600 cubic meters of water, for an irrigation surface of 456 hectares,” despite the fact that the farm “sits in the Almonte-Marismas aquifer, which feeds the Almonte-Marismas National Park. Doñana”, a space of maximum protection due to its exceptional natural values, declared World Heritage and Biosphere Reserve by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
They withdrew “volumes of water much higher than those authorized”
In that sense, the initial sentence of the 14th Criminal Court declared proven that “especially between 2008 and 2013, the five defendants, being fully aware of the legal protection and environmental value of the space they owned on the Hato Blanco Viejo farm, as well as the conditions relating to the use of water imposed by the CHG, have deliberately failed to comply with the conditions established by the basin organization, withdrawing volumes of water much higher than those authorized, which is likely to put the ecosystem at serious risk. , and they have transferred water from the north to the south.”
“This situation of abuse in the extraction of water above the permitted volumes had already caused the CHG to initiate disciplinary proceedings in previous years, which all ended with heavy sanctions to the family community of property in which the brothers were integrated, and in some cases individually, which were confirmed administratively and sometimes by the courts,” the initial ruling stated.
“Despite this, with indifference to the damage they had caused and were causing to the aquifer and thus to the community, the defendants continued to proceed in the same way, knowing of the non-compliance with environmental protection regulations,” the Court of the Criminal.
Damage of almost two million euros
According to that ruling, “the damage caused to the public hydraulic domain generated by the defendants between 2008 and 2013 has amounted to a total of 1,967,617.95 euros.” The court declared all of them direct co-authors of a crime against the environment in conjunction with a crime of damage to the public hydraulic domain, with the mitigation of undue delays, imposing on each of them two years and five months in prison for the first crime and a year in prison for the second, with fines and the obligation to jointly compensate the CHG with almost two million euros.
Now, the Fourth Section of the Court has partially upheld the resources of the five brothers by applying the mitigating circumstance of undue delays as highly qualified, reducing those sentences.
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