Miguelturra City Council is preparing and studying “in detail” its legal defense to Unicaja’s patrimonial claim
of five million euros as compensation for the damages suffered by the mortgage of the facilities of the headquarters of the extinct CEOE-Cepyme (today Public College María Elena Maseras) and the mortgage interests since in 2012 the Ciudadrealeña Business Confederation ratified the entry into the bankruptcy of creditors with the closure a few days after its headquarters, lifted in municipal lands.
The mayor of the town, Luis Ramón Mohíno, in statements to La Tribuna, points out that the main objective is to protect the interests of the municipality. To do this, he emphasized, we have external legal advice and with the support of municipal legal services, which have already taken legal measures. In this sense, Mohíno provides that the letter of his defense be presented in this month of July and regrets that the City Council will do it alone, without the Community Board of Castilla-La Mancha, to which Unicaja has also asked for a judicial claim and which initially the councilor requested a joint action, “since it was the administration that promoted the educational use of the building.” But it has not been possible.
The government team seeks from the “minute one” solutions to reach an agreement that prevents neighbors from having to pay the five million euros that the financial entity claims. With that objective, the mayor has met with several members of Unicaja in order to know “his predisposition to fix the situation”, waiting for judicial procedures. But, for now, he points out, they continue to advance in their arguments, in which they defend that «we as a City Council cannot take care of what they are claiming. We have not been the ones who have put a school there, it has been jointly with the Board of Communities of Castilla-La Mancha, which assigned that school, and that installation is being used. It does not correspond to us only what is claimed, ”argues the local councilor.
Mayor Miguelturreño points out that the Consistory “does not agree with the amount that is claimed”, so the City Council will try to prove in its defense that the building, at the time the school works began, did not have the real value that is being given. “He was vandalized, practically everything had been taken and there was an important deterioration,” he recalls while noting that a work of “size” had to be carried out to adapt the property to the school.
The objective is that a penny is not to be paid, although there is also another more realistic scenario in which an economic compensation is negotiated much less than the five million claimed, since “in the event that we are forced to pay, we will fight to be as much as possible,” he said. “We will fight with nails and teeth so that the decisions that were made at the time do not harm us economically,” he says. “We cannot face that amount that is requested.”
In the part of the building that is not occupied by the Educational Center, the City Council works in the installation of the Municipal School of Music, thus reinforcing “the character of educational service, both regulated and not regulated, of the property,” he said. Mohíno trusts that the works of the first phase of this project begin “shortly” after its award. In this regard, he ensures that Unicaja’s patrimonial claim will not endanger the existence of the school.
