The Minister of Agriculture in Spain’s Extremadura will have to close her illegal well and face a fine of up to 10,000 euros. She owns a vineyard with an illegal well.
The Guadiana Hydrographic Confederation assures that the installation cannot be legalised because it is located in the Tierra de Barros water body, which has been declared endangered due to overexploitation.
The Extremaduran Minister of Agriculture, Mercedes Morán, who has an illegal well on a vineyard she owns, has been ordered to close it down. According to the Guadiana River Basin Authority (CHG), in a written reply to questions from the PSOE parliamentary group in the Congress of Deputies, technicians inspected the dry plot, located in the Tierra de Barros region of Badajoz, on 23 September, five days after the existence of an illegal well on the PP leader’s land was revealed in Diario Extremadura.
The Confederation’s Public Hydraulic Domain Surveillance Service issued a report stating that the land had this irrigation system and that at the time there was “no evidence of its use”. This does not mean, however, that there are ‘indications’ of a ‘possible violation of the Water Code’, according to the CHG, which is why the illegal abstraction is being monitored in order to act in accordance with the law.
Neither the agricultural councillor in María Guardiola’s government nor her brother have applied for recognition of private water rights on the 3.5-hectare plot. However, the Confederación del Guadiana warns that this attempt to legalise the well would be rejected because it is located in the Tierra de Barros groundwater body, which has been declared at risk, and the Hydrological Planning Office would issue a ‘report of non-compatibility’.
The response from the basin organisation to the PSOE councillors also states that there have been no complaints and no sanction proceedings have been initiated ‘at this time’. However, it explains that the opening of a water intake without a licence in a water body declared to be at risk and the unauthorised abstraction of water are considered administrative offences.
Fines for the owner
Specifically, the opening of wells and the installation of groundwater extraction equipment without prior concession or authorisation is a minor offence punishable by a fine of up to 10,000 euros. Irrespective of this penalty, the law requires the well to be closed.
But who has to pay the fine? According to the Water Code, the persons responsible for this type of infringement are the owner of the land, the promoter of the water catchment area, the entrepreneur carrying out the work and the technical director of the same.
After the existence of an illegal well was discovered on a plot of land that she owned, Extremadura councillor Mercedes Morán claimed that she was “aware of the situation”, but that she “neither exploits nor has exploited” the vineyards, but rather “another owner”, because she did not initially realise that it was her brother.
Judge and party in Tierra de Barros
The PP leader also assured elDiario.es Extremadura that she had learned of the existence of this infrastructure through a ‘field inspection’ carried out by her ministry and that ‘the person who exploits’ the plot would be subject to ‘relevant penalties in the CAP aid’, since it is a recipient of European aid for dry land. In addition, last year Morán granted six million euros in exceptional aid to unirrigated vineyards in Extremadura to alleviate the drought affecting the sector.
It should also be noted that the land she owns has been affected by the expropriations for the Tierra de Barros mega-irrigation project, which was originally planned to cover 15,000 hectares. The councillor refused the opportunity to include her unirrigated land in the project to be converted into irrigated land, and when she was already in government, the PP and Vox, then partners, left the project with virtually no funds, which now has to be ‘resized’ and could lose up to a third of the area that was to be converted from unirrigated to irrigated land.
For all these reasons, the PSOE and Unidas por Extremadura managed last October to get the Regional Assembly of Extremadura to ‘censure’ the Minister of Agriculture, also thanks to Vox’s abstention.
