The Campos Peña landowner family, convicted of the plundering of water at the gates of Doñana, will be able to avoid prison after the sentence of the Seville Court, which has reduced it the initial sentence of three and a half years in prison to one and a half years. The five landowner brothers, owners of the Hato Blanco Viejo farm in Aznalcázar (Seville), were in September 2023 the first landowners sentenced to more than two years in prison for plundering water in the National Park aquifer after stealing 19.4 million cubic meters of water from 2008 to 2013, but now the Court reduces the sentence by less than half because it considers the mitigation of undue delays to be very qualified. That is to say, the landowners are guilty of a crime against the environment and another of damages, now ratified in the second instance, but since justice has taken a decade to convict them, none of them will go to prison.
The conviction of the 14th Criminal Court of the Andalusian capital marked a milestone a year ago, since until then none of the dozens of offending farmers in the provinces of Huelva and Seville had gone to prison, not exceeding two years of sentence. for mining the overexploited Doñana aquifer. Now magistrates Mercedes Fernández, Elvira Alberola and Joaquín Yust overturn the forceful initial sentence and partially uphold the appeal of the landowners, who will avoid their imprisonment. The ruling sentences them to one year in prison for a crime against the environment and six months for a crime of damage, in addition to a fine of 4,200 euros and 1.9 million in compensation for the massive theft of water committed.
To raise the level of undue delays, the court recalls that the events date back—initially—to 2008, 16 years before this ruling and 11 since his indictment in 2013. The judges allege that the case entered “into collapse.” and “absolute paralysis” for just over three years, in addition to the four years it took for the justice system to hold the trial in the first instance. The ruling admits the technical complexity of the case described, the number of accused and witnesses, the expert reports of the State Attorney General’s Office and the numerous reports from experts who intervened in the process, but none of this justifies the delay of more than a decade for prosecute the landowners. “The delay has been extremely extraordinary,” the judges highlight.
The Court recognizes that “the temporal extension (six years) and the seriousness of the event” reinforce the serious risk of the crime against the environment committed. But he reproaches the judge of first instance, Isabel de Luque, “that her assessment to increase the sentence above the legal minimum” required “more profound reasoning” than that presented. The first ruling in the case was 48 pages long. Crime against the environment has a maximum penalty of five years in prison, but the Campos Peña have received one year in prison.
The ruling recalls how the defendants could have avoided damage to the environment through mechanisms to control water to extract from wells, authorized or illegal, but they refused to do so. “Consciously and voluntarily, the accountants did not exist,” the magistrates reproach.
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Three of the brothers, Ana, José María and Antonio Campos Peña, tried before the Court to evade their sentence for not being involved in the administration of the farm and remaining unrelated to it. But the judges remind them that “it is unsustainable” to argue that the brothers and partners of the agricultural company were unaware of the “years of sanctions” by the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation, three of which were ratified by the Supreme Court. The convicted brothers, one of them a priest and his sister residing in the United Kingdom, had “sufficient intellectual level” to realize the mechanism of agricultural exploitation and its “constant illegal extraction of water.” “To ignore, to ignore, to look the other way, is not sustainable when the warnings were multiple and prolonged over time,” the Court decides, calling the brothers’ behavior “deliberate ignorance” and “blindness.”
The ruling recalls at this point “the constant obstruction to the water police when they tried to access the property once they noticed unauthorized areas where watering was taking place, and above all, the absolute absence of control regarding the water to be extracted.” Since 2005, the landowners decided to prevent the water police from accessing their farm to verify the water extracted from the aquifer, until the Confederation, dependent on the Ministry of Ecological Transition, regularized the crops in 2018, six years ago. He did so despite the more than five million in fines that the offending owners had accumulated.
After the first instance ruling, the Campos Peña also appealed the amount of the fine, which amounts to 4,200 euros, but the Court sees it as proportionate when remembering their patrimonial capacity, since the family’s properties are valued at 3.3 million euros. .
The illegal collection of water in this Sevillian agricultural estate where the reserve begins at its northern end, on the border between the two westernmost provinces of Andalusia, was “systematic, ambitious, of an industrial nature and maintained for years,” the initial sentence stressed. . The theft has been of such volume that the water table of the aquifer dropped up to 15 meters, the expert assigned to the Technical Unit of the Environmental Prosecutor’s Office had highlighted. Campos Peña only had permission to irrigate 456 hectares of a total of 1,044 with rice, cotton and beets on their farm.
The Court’s ruling only allows for an appeal to the Supreme Court for violation of the law. When asked, the family’s lawyer, Juan Luis Pérez Marín, refused to confirm whether he will appeal the conviction before the high court.
The conviction of the Seville Court ratifies the payment of the 1.9 million as compensation. However, The continuous litigation of Campos Peña has generated great savings over the last decade: Of the 5.7 million that the landowners should have paid in fines to the justice system and the Administration, they only paid 770,072 euros, 13% of the total, as admitted last winter by the Guadalquivir Hydrographic Confederation in a written response through the Portal of Transparency. Between 1997 and 2013, the businessmen accumulated 14 million-dollar fines, three of them ratified by the Supreme Court. Of these latest fines, the Confederation did not collect a single cent of the 2.1 million that they included as sanctions.
