It seems that the time has come to talk about one of the most sordid matters that the previous Consistory of Barcelona bequeathed to the city. On Monday, in the Readers’ Letters section, Carles Roura Fornés published one that should be read again. He wrote: “Recently and for the third time there has been a court ruling against the project of the island of Calle Consell de Cent and its surroundings undertaken by Ada Colau and Janet Sanz, openly violating the ordinances because, as the ruling says, ‘it should have been approved as a modification of the General Metropolitan Plan and it was done as an ordinary work, when in no case can it be considered as such. Taking into account these court rulings, will there not be any penalty for abuse of political power?”. I answer you myself, Mr. Roura: there won’t be any.
On the same Monday, a few pages later, Enric Sierra, deputy director of this newspaper, dedicated an article to the case in which he acknowledges that “little is said about the assumption of responsibilities by the authors of such a big scandal”. He’s right. It should be talked about a lot more. Sierra mentions the “negative effects on mobility that this project and others like it have left in the city” and how they have shot up housing prices and contributed to the gentrification they supposedly wanted to combat. He says: “Collboni knows that he has a hot potato that can turn out to be very expensive, because the judgments force him to restore these streets and squares as they were before the works, which cost more than 50 million”.
We all know there will be no restitution. “Who pays for all this?” asked Josep Pla one day in New York. It is not recorded that anyone answered him. In this Barcelona case, the citizens will pay for it, once again, while those responsible for the nyap escape, smiling and, of course, with the Palestinian scarf around their necks.
