Butwell Trading, the corporate owner of Quinta da Rocha, inadvertently has made legal history as the first company to be fined under Portugal’s new environmental protection laws.
The Judicial Court in Portimão has penalised the company for ignoring the Loulé court order that it desist from damaging further the Quinta da Rocha estate and that Butwell makes good its damage to rare habitats.
Butwell has been preparing the 200 hectare estate for transformation into a tourist complex including two, five star hotels and all the usual bells and whistles to entice the council into approving yet another unwanted 'quality tourism' project slap bang in an area that most want kept as rather attractive and environmentally sensitive countryside.
Butwell is controlled by eco-vandal Aprígio Santos (pictured) and now has to pay €140,000 to the government. If it fails to do so, coercive recovery action should be taken and the estate auctioned off to pay the debt.
The increasingly remote figure of Aprígio Santos, currently involved in trying to sell of many of his assets to the Chinese to cover his estimated €600 million borrowings, has been replaced on the scene by his son Joel Hervé dos Santos who is saddled with running Butwell and who now will be in charge of paying the fine.
Son of Santos already has indicated that Butwell will appeal the ruling. This serves to drag the process on and on with less and less chance of the area ever being granted planning permission for this old style type of development.
Aprígio Santos was found guilty in the Loulé court in 2012 for crimes against nature and for the deliberate destruction of protected species and their habitats at Quinta da Rocha.
Santos’ treatment of the estate had paid no regard to its ecology and his destruction of rare habitat in contravention of the law made him a local hate figure, above the law and part of the old regime that could act with impunity on the road to untold wealth.
It seems this approach no longer works as the elite is taken to task using the laws that other citizens have to follow.
The hero of this contest has been the eco-organisation A Rocha whose lawyer, speaking to Sul Informaçao last week, said that the criminal liability of companies in cases of environmental damage was only introduced into the Criminal Code in 2007.
"Until now, nature was the poor relation of environmental law" said lawyer Joaquim Sabino Rogério.
"It is now defined that in terms of nature conservation, plants also need to be respected," said Dr Rogério, adding that "the fine of €140,000 is significant."
The specific order from the 2012 judgment was clear enough, that the owners of Quinta da Rocha should refrain from any work involving groundworks or removal of vegetation in the areas where protected species and habitats have been registered and the complete replacement of all the natural areas already destroyed."
This judgment was confirmed in 2014 by the Central Administrative Court for the South but Butwell has failed to follow the ruling and so the Judicial Court of Portimão concluded that Butwell had ‘violated several imperatives in the Administrative Court's decisions,' which led to this further fine.
Butwell’s submission to Portimão council for its tourist project is due in July but an earlier council assembly proposal that the plan be rejected was successful.
The behaviour of Aprígio Santos and of Butwell will not help the case for a huge tourist development in the Alvor estuary.
In the light of the environmental damage already carried out in the name of Mammon, the council is under local and internal pressure to reject this project once-and-for-all.
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