Arona must pay €2,000,000 to Zentral Centre owners for seven years' unpaid rent

[Janet]

Santa Cruz Court 4 has confirmed the compensation that Arona Ayuntamiento must pay for having used a 1,200 square metre office suite in the Zentral Centre in Playa de las Américas without paying any rent or services for seven years between 2004 and 2012 when it was finally evicted. For rent alone, the council has to reimburse Compañía Popular Canaria SA, the private company which owns the block, €1,478,603. To this must be added costs for electricity, water, and community charges which Arona refused to pay. The total will come to around €2,000,000.

The Ayuntamiento has known of this decision since April, and on Tuesday, the council met to agree 2013′s budget, in which was included a "contingency fund" of €1.6 million for "unforeseen expenses". After AquíSur published an article suggesting that some expenses were more than "foreseen" and that the Council was trying to conceal the Zentral payment, Hacienda Councillor María Candelaria Padrón admitted that the money was "destined for payments needed to comply with Court judgments". We might live in hope that one of those judgments might be the lifeguards, who like the owners of the Zentral Centre, are still waiting for the money the Court has ruled they should receive from the Ayuntamiento. JA