Hotel Tivoli; no license, no permit, bad building. Due to open this summer

The families of the two construction workers killed in the Hotel Tivoli collapse last week are still grieving and the politicians are still arguing over whether or not the hotel, abandoned since 1992 and due to open this summer, has all the necessary licences and permits. According to the United Left party (Esquerra Unida) Palma councillors, the city council planning officer, Rafael Vidal, is guilty of an alleged “cover up”. According to the United Left, the part of the hotel which collapsed last week, (a three-storey annex) did not have building permission. Spokesperson for the EU, Margalida Thomas, said she and her colleagues have been over the building developer's documentation and it appears that the company had no permission to change the roof and replace the wrought iron railings on the annex, only the main block. According to Thomas, the developers had not even applied for permission to carry out reformation work on the building which came crashing down last week, killing two builders and injuring three others. One of the injured remains in a critical condition in a Palma hospital. According to the Palma fire brigade, the reason for the hotel collapse was that the “breeze- block” walls could no longer hold up the weight of the building. As far as Thomas is concerned, both Vidal and Tourism Councillor Joan Bauza, have failed to tell the truth about which licences and permits the hotel has or does not have. “The Esquerra Unida-want to make it quite clear that Vidal knew right from the start,” Thomas proclaimed yesterday. The city councillor, having read the documents explained yesterday that in July and October last year, permission was granted for the roof of the main hotel and the wrought iron to be replaced at a cost of 18 million pesetas, but she stressed that permission was only apparently given for work on the main hotel and not the annex (which later collapsed).