The House of Gondomar will continue the process of expropriating the land on which Rio Tinto Cemetery No. 2 is located to avoid the removal of the more than a thousand dead buried there, as the court ruled.
The decision to expropriate these lands, which will be taken this Friday at a meeting of local authorities, follows from the decision of the Judicial Court of Comarca Porto through Huizo de Enforcement Valongo, which obliges the council to excavate more than a thousand dead in this cemetery within one month.
At stake is about 10,000 square meters of land, which had five owners and was sold to the municipality by a real estate company in 2001 as “free of fees or encumbrances”.
“After trying in recent days to understand whether this was legally possible and what methodology to apply, we are going to start the process of expropriation after the presentation in the chamber today,” Mark Martins, mayor of Gondomar, told Luse. .
In anticipation that the procedure “will be swift and it will be possible to put an end once and for all” to the litigation, the socialist mayor noted that “the expropriation process will run in parallel with the appeal” that the municipality will present.
“We expect the expropriation process to be completed in six months,” he said.
The mayor recalled that “the chamber simply did not agree earlier, because there are several heirs,” and the municipality did not know “to whom to transfer part” of the money involved.
In addition, it was established that “there will only be an agreement with all the heirs”, which, Marko Martins stressed, could not be achieved, because “there was no agreement between them.”
“The expropriation process guarantees legitimacy and access to an amount that will be fixed for all heirs,” he said, recalling that it was this methodology that was used to unblock the construction of the “Parque Urbano de Gondomar”, in which there was a lawsuit, and that the chamber made a fixed amount by court order, and later, when there was an agreement, they had the money.
A week ago, when the verdict was announced, Marco Martins said he was “in a state of shock” and considered the decision “illegal and meaningless.”
In an interview with Lusa on the 7th, Marko Mārtiņš stated that the council would appeal against the verdict “until the final consequences”, given that “among other aspects”, the court did not take into account the “sentimental side of the issue”.
In the decision, the court rejected the municipality’s argument that the land on which the cemetery operates is in the public domain, thus enforcing a 2019 judgment obliging the municipality to return those square meters as they were. , without the buildings of the cemetery, including more than a thousand dead buried there.
Author: Portuguese
Source: CM Jornal
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