Corruption

 As the Government and the Spanish people take a month's holiday (or as much of it as they can afford), let's look at the current crop of corruption cases. 

This session appears as part of my Business over Tapas weekly report. Find it here.  

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There are many obstacles appearing to attempt to tone down the Caso Montoro. From elDiario.es, we read: ‘The 'miracle' of the Montoro case: the hindrances to investigating the all-powerful Finance Minister under the Partido Popular. The prosecutor in charge of the case attempted to open a separate investigation to expand the case with the help of the Tax Agency and the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police), but the opposition of the chief anti-corruption prosecutor and the passivity of the UCO (Guardia Civil judicial department) made it impossible’. The article says: ‘The judicial investigation into the consulting firm Equipo Económico, which has indicted Cristóbal Montoro and nine of his collaborators at the Ministry of Finance, enters a new phase after seven years with the recent lifting of secrecy. Judge Rubén Rus must take statements from the 28 suspects unless any of the appeals filed against the investigation, which has lasted more than seven years, are unsuccessful…’

El País says that much of the Montoro material has been sealed by investigators.

 

Montoro’s most famous remark (from back in 2010) was: "Let Spain fall and we will build it up again". It often shows up in political articles.

 

Keeping up the pressure. From 20Minutos here: ‘Judges and prosecutors call for García Ortiz's resignation: "It's unnecessary to put the Prosecutor's Office through this ordeal"’. As the case against Ayuso’s boyfriend stumbles along (the court asks for a little under four years for corruption), the main victim of this story is the PSOE-appointed Attorney General). Maldita has ‘questions and answers about the Attorney General’s imputation’.

 

More on the trumped-up case against the Attorney General: ‘A prosecutor in the dock without evidence: justice in Spain in free fall’. At Spanish Revolution, we are bitterly told of ‘When the robe weighs more than the truth and the Supreme Court turns the presumption of innocence into a bad joke’.

The website says: ‘The Supreme Court has decided to prosecute the Attorney General of the State, Álvaro García Ortiz, for the alleged crime of revealing secrets in the case of Ayuso's boyfriend. There is no solid evidence. There are no witnesses pointing the finger at him. Only weak clues and a narrative so flimsy that it would collapse in any court that respected basic rights. Meanwhile, the dissenting opinion of Judge Andrés Palomo del Arco exposes the botched job: he places the head of the Public Prosecutor's Office in the dock with a string of conjectures, denying the value of the testimony of journalists who saw the famous email before the prosecutor himself, demanding that they waive the constitutional protection of their sources, and signing an order that seems more like a political order than a legal decision…’ elDiario.es also has an opinion: ‘The incredible case of the explosive email –  They want to try and imprison the Attorney General because the Supreme Court Justice Hurtado believes whatever he wants to believe and has turned an email—debunking a hoax—into a cluster bomb, which could also bring down the government.

In short, it’s a mess designed – as usual – to weaken the socialist government.

 

The Boyfriend of Ayuso’s Case has stumbled once again. From El País here: ‘The judge in the Alberto González Amador case withdraws mid-proceedings: So now what?’ The judge had been investigating the boyfriend for the past sixteen months, but she’s now 65 and has promptly retired. Another judge is suggested (he’s a year older than the last one, but shows no sign of slowing down…)

 

There’s also a fuss about Judge Peinado’s country-house and swimming pool in the municipality of La Adrada (Ávila) which was listed as a warehouse many years ago. It appears that the judge got away with it after the paperwork was shelved in the townhall until the property was deemed ‘legal’. The judge is now suing some social media accuser for 25,000 euros. The story at El Plural here and here.

 

A spate of resignations has followed the Noelia Núñez (the PP spokesperson for two days) event. These include politicians and various officials who appear to have (no doubt inadvertently) amplified their academic achievements. 20Minutos has ‘The resumé crisis: The Partido Popular asserts that "inflating resumés is not the same as falsifying qualifications"’. Quite!

It must be quite common in political circles to claim titles one doesn’t have. Just in Valencia, we read: ‘Twenty senior Mazón officials are breaking the law by not registering the university degrees they claim to possess’. Worse still, the president of the Senado has also been obliged to adjust his scholastic qualifications.

 

A word that came into the Spanish language back in 2003: ‘Tamayazo’. Wiki tells us that during the vote to construct the new Madrid Government of 30th June, 2003, ‘Two elected parliamentarians from the PSOE, Eduardo Tamayo and María Teresa Sáez Laguna, prevented the election of Rafael Simancas as the new president of the Community of Madrid by abstaining from the second investiture vote. This case of defection ultimately forced a repeat election in October of that same year, after which Esperanza Aguirre (PP) became the new regional president…’ While, unproven, the suspicion is that they were ‘bought off’, and thus un tamayazo means a politician (aka un tránsfuga) changing his support when by doing so, his erstwhile team would lose an important vote.

Montoro, as the Wheel Turns Again

It looks like the Partido Popular has – inadvertently – handed a reprieve to the PSOE and their current troubles following the discovery of (yet again) a nest of bad eggs in their own barn.

Recently, we were talking of the abrupt fall of the Socialists’ party organiser Santos Cerdán, after he was found to be taking bribes from some Ibex-35 companies. He’s now in prison awaiting events.

We always knew that the other lot was full of crooks – several still in jail and many others due to attend court in the months to come. Why, the last PP government of Mariano Rajoy fell thanks precisely to corruption.

Conservatives (if you will forgive the generalisation) are known to be more interested in money than they are in helping the underprivileged. We barely raise an eyebrow when one of their politicians is caught with his hand in the till. It’s all part of the game. There’s a difference though, when one of the progressives, the defenders of the workers, a syndicalist, a man of the people (and so on…) pulls a fast one on both his party and his country.

See, that’s not good.

Going back to the Felipe Gonzalez years, the PSOE have had a few ministers in jail (José Barrionuevo and Rafael Vera), or – do you remember the party member from Zaragoza who was promoted to be head of the Guardia Civil, Luis Roldán, and who ended up with a fortune in Switzerland and was forced to make a run for it in 1994, eventually being caught in Bangkok to be jailed for 31 years? Not good. Later, the Andalusian wing of the party was found to be immersed in irregularities – two presidents of the Junta de Andalucía (Chaves and Griñán) plus a handful of others being found guilty in the ERE scandal.

But what of the Partido Popular? Aznar’s government at one time had a few bad eggs for sure: three of his ministers went to jail (Rodrigo Rato, Jaume Matas and Eduardo Zaplana), a couple of others managed to obtain pardons and now, after a secret judicial inquiry lasting several years (sometimes, these things can be more secret than others), another minister from those and later times, Cristóbal Montoro, the long-time Minister for Hacienda, has been rumbled.

 

Montoro, who just a couple of weeks ago was seated up on the podium at the PP’s national congress, was a powerful party apparatchik who was not necessarily liked by his co-religionists: “He did a lot of damage, and now he’s going to do a lot more damage,” a PP council member says mournfully.

Montoro, the finance minister under both Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, now stands accused of the crimes of “bribery, fraud against the Public Administration, malfeasance, influence peddling, prohibited negotiations, business corruption and document falsification” for allegedly favouring, while he was Minister of Finance in Mariano Rajoy's government, gas companies that were clients of the law firm he founded in 2006’. He started a private legal firm which charged high sums to companies interested in Government-sponsored changes to their tax-burdens.

The Guardian says: ‘…It is alleged that Montoro established the “economic team”, a lawyer’s office linked to the finance ministry, which took kickbacks from gas and other energy companies in return for favourable government policy. It is further told that between 2008 and 2015 Montoro and 27 others accused, among them senior treasury officials, were paid at least eleven million euros by big energy companies. According to the police investigation led by the judge Rubén Rus, “the economic team received large commissions in return for its capacity to influence legislative and executive powers”’.

Other scams are coming out, like re-writing the worst excesses of the PP’s ‘black account’ before it reached the courts in 2020.

Montoro was evidently a big fish in the PP. He has now resigned from the party while maintaining his innocence. Over the weekend, two senior figures in Hacienda, both involved in the Montoro affair, were also dismissed.  

In passing – well done the judiciary for keeping this inquiry silent for a full seven years!

The advantage for the PP was already beginning to slip from their fingers, the accusations from the eccentric Judge Peinado against the wife of Pedro Sánchez notwithstanding.

In the months to come, no less than thirty PP scandals will be brought to trial.

‘Public procurement rigging, bribe-taking, illegal urban development plans, influence peddling, irregular financing, even failure to provide assistance and negligent homicides; also the use of reserved funds for paramilitary operations…’ Plus the issues with Isabel Ayuso’s boyfriend (the Court is asking for three years and nine months) and the ongoing inquiry into Carlos Mazón in Valencia regarding his inactivity during the flood last autumn.

With the perhaps unfortunate timing of the release of the Montoro scandal, the recent aggression from Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been abruptly toned down: ‘Whatever needs to be investigated, let it be investigated’, he tweets.

And lastly, another headache for Feijóo – with a fact-checker reporting ‘Several senior officials from the Feijóo era in Galicia have been charged with corruption despite what the Popular Party leader claims’.

Which brings us to Vox. See, neither the PSOE nor the PP can claim that – unlike Vox – they’ve never had a crooked minister mortally embarrassed by the media filming him (or her) as he is admitted into the Soto de Real prison. Vox is the party that can claim the laurel (apart from the small issues of race, foreigners and so on, plus the current fraud-case against their erstwhile leader in Andalucía Francisco Serrano. The court is asking for eight years).

So, does the fall of Montoro trump the Cerdán scandal?

Better still, should we all be taking an enjoyable summer’s reprieve from politics?

If Pedro Sánchez can hold his government together: that’s the question, and will someone else, one of ours or one of theirs – be abruptly found to have been on the take?

It’s a dirty business, politics, but someone has to do it.

Racism in Murcia

 While I’m writing something silly about fruit juice, the foul Vox machine has been heating up the racism card. Last week, their spokesperson Rocío de Meer was on about deporting the eight million foreigners here (and turning Spain into, once again, a Christian nation, a bit behind the times perhaps, but with everyone knowing their place).

Now, in one of those towns where there are lots of North African labourers, in Murcia (a fertile province for those who hear voxes), there have been several days of riots in Torre Pacheco (population 41,600 of which around 11,500 are foreign workers).

The issue comes from local and imported troublemakers following an incident last week where an elderly local person was beaten by a local Moorish kid with a rock, with his two friends watching, to put something on TikTok. A video of a totally different event, occurring in Almería, found its way to the social media. ‘The person who was beaten and appears in the video released by the neo-Nazis Alvise, Desokupa, Frente Obrero, Vox, and their media apparatus is named as José Moya. He's a sin-techo (a beggar) from Almería which is where this event occurred. The two boys who beat him are Spanish and are in prison’.

But, back to Torre Pacheco. elDiario.es says ‘Over the weekend, brigades of dozens of extremists have deployed violently through the streets of this town with the intention of "hunting" immigrants. Their pretext? That a 68-year-old man was beaten last week. Initially, it was said that the attackers were a group of Moroccans; now, the story is more likely that the attacker was a young man (a Moroccan youth was later arrested while attempting to escape to France). With that, with a single action, denounced and xenophobically described by Vox as if it were almost an act of war, an entire operation of collective violence has been fabricated, which has received reinforcements from outside the town…’ By Monday, ten people had been arrested, another thirty had been fined and a further eighty identified by the police. Many of them coming in from elsewhere to participate.

Newtral wades through the various fictions here. A video of ultras attacking a kebab store while the police look on in Torre Pacheco is here. From El Plural here: ‘The Vox leader in Murcia, José Ángel Antelo, maintained that Spain should be a country "for those who come to work and respect its laws," and called for stricter enforcement and deportation policies. "We don't want people like that on our streets or in our country. We're going to deport them all: not a single one will remain. People come to Spain to work and generate wealth, not to commit crimes or spread terror," he added’.

For Santiago Abascal (seen here dressed as a concentration camp commandant in a mock-up video from minute 3.14 made with material from ‘Deport Them Now’ in an Italian exposé) and his extremist party, it’s all good. La Marea has more here. 

Deport Them Now is explained at EOLaPaz here: ‘On the fringes of social media, where algorithms reward outrage and misinformation, the "Deport Them Now" group emerged in 2021. This transnational platform quickly transformed from a mere hashtag into a structured xenophobic movement. With roots in Anglo-Saxon far-right forums and connections to European identity movements, its message is clear: the mass expulsion of immigrants is the only solution to Europe's "problems" of security, unemployment, and cultural identity’’…’

From elDiario.es here: ‘experts consulted by elDiario.es about the Deport Them Now group agree that it "is suspicious." They emphasize that it is "well organized," and one suggests that it could be the result of astroturfing, a manipulation strategy that consists of simulating a spontaneous citizen movement when in reality it is directed by those with specific interests. This is a common tactic in political and digital propaganda: feigning popular support for a cause, when that support is actually inflated or outright fabricated, in order to gain legitimacy and amplify its impact.’

From Robando Tu Tiempo here: ‘The bulo of the small government handouts and the selective memory of a country that also emigrated. Few hoaxes have penetrated the collective imagination as deeply as the one that immigrants come to Spain "to live off small allowances". A mantra repeated ad nauseam by the far right, amplified on social media and in bars, and defended without data by parties like Vox, whose discourse is based on fear, misinformation, and xenophobia. But when this narrative is compared with the data, there is no other possible conclusion: it is flatly false…’

Onda Cero says: This is what would happen in Spain if immigration disappeared. Spain is not experiencing an invasion, but rather a relationship of functional interdependence with the countries of the global south. In other words, what is presented as a problem is, in reality, a structural necessity’.

From El HuffPost here: ‘The impossible promise to deport eight million people: "It would be social and economic suicide". Vox's proposal violates fundamental rights and would lead Spain to ruin with a sharp drop in production and a blow to the pension system’.

Later: A far more disturbing attack by a recent Moroccan immigrant (he was already due to be returned to that country) occurred this Wednesday morning in Tenerife, where he set on fire an underage girl, who is now in hospital with 95% burns. The question for the Voxers, of course, is… is she Spanish or is she Moroccan? It will make a huge difference to them.

Just One More Thing

The two main parties in Spain both had a busy weekend with the PP having a three-day congress (they called it a conclave for some reason) and the PSOE reduced to a single Saturday Federal Committee to determine who is to remain on the bridge.

"I am fully aware that these are difficult days for everyone", Pedro Sánchez began… They certainly are, with the senior ex-companion Santos Cerdán now in preventative prison (the judiciary can act fast when they want to).

The Partido Popular is riding a wave at the present time. They can’t say much about the Government’s efforts to improve the economy (since they’ve been most successful while keeping faith with the workers and the retired). But now, look, they’ve got the PSOE where they want them – caught with a massive finger in the till.

While the PSOE tends to eject from their ranks any trespasser (another one went on Saturday – as Franciso Salazar was accused of inappropriate behaviour with his female staff) – the PP is known to have a more laid-back attitude, with several barons (Ayuso, Mazón and Moreno for example) conspicuously failing to keep their house in proper order.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo was supported on the first day of the conclave by both José Maria Aznar and Mariano Rajoy – as they talked about the desperate corruption within the PSOE (the pots calling the kettle black – voters luckily have short memories).

We remember the photo of Aznar with his cabinet, twelve of whom ended up in trouble.

M. Rajoy, whose Interior Minister is on trial in 2026 for Operation Kitchen.

The president whose police illegally investigated Podemos leaders with fake accusations and claims, as if they were the political police of an authoritarian regime.

The same Rajoy who enjoyed the comforts of the refurbished Calle Génova party headquarters, financed as it was with dirty money.

Indeed, the pair of them were positively Trumpian – give the enemy no quarter. Oddly, the forgotten PP leader Pablo Casado appears to have been airbrushed from the nostalgic photo.

Feijóo in his speech to the party faithful stated that when it came to ‘lies, concessions, manoeuvres, propaganda, or opposing the Spanish people, then the PSOE have all the cards. But when it comes to values, convictions, projects, service, and democracy, then our solid project is going to crush them!’ La Vanguardia reported on Sunday that ‘Feijóo is already launching his presidential campaign and, without rejecting Vox, he hopes to govern alone’. Two things there – first, the next elections are pencilled in for 2027 (yes, and with fingers crossed); and secondly, the likelihood of a majority of seats going to the PP, without recourse to the far-right, is disappearingly small.

To say that the PP did worse things while they were in power than anything that could have come from the PSOE is, of course, a mistake. All this does is undermine people’s confidence in their leaders and, with angry or careless voters ready to support the hungry and be-fanged little fishies lurking in the shadows of the coral reefs, we could still be in for some desperate times to come.

Indeed, it turns out that one of those little fishies is a shark. El País reports that ‘Vox openly advocates deporting eight million immigrants and their children. "It will be a complex process, but we have the right to survive as a people," argues Rocío de Meer, spokesperson for the far-right party.

In Spain, including us foreign residents, there are around nine million of us. Maybe those of us who are white enough will be allowed to stay.

Summer Business

The political season is more or less over, with holidays for the deputies and their families until the next emergency comes along, or – with luck – until September.

Politics, or course, continues the year round, and the PP will be having their XXI National Congress from July 4th to the 6th (with the special presence of both José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy). The Partido Popular says in a statement: ‘…While the Popular Party's conclave "will be one of unity" and will take place "in a context of absolute normality," the PSOE will hold its Federal Committee in a "diametrically opposite" situation, as a party that is "bleeding itself dry internally and cornered by countless cases of corruption".

Because, yes, the PSOE will be holding their own meeting on Saturday in their headquarters in Madrid, having changed the venue at the last minute from Seville. They will need to discuss the ongoing problems and corruption issues, plus find a substitute for the departed Santos Cerdán, who was abruptly jailed by Order of the Court on Monday.  

This week, Seville was the host for the United Nations Conference on Financing Development. At least fifty world leaders gathered in Seville to address global concerns, including hunger, climate change and healthcare. The Americans (having closed down most of their USAID programs) gave it a miss. The smiling quartet of Pedro Sánchez and his wife, Felipe VI and his wife, welcomed the attendees. Spare a thought for Seville, which has been locked down with 6,000 extra police, drones and whatever version of robocop is currently in use.

The guests will be sure to notice that it’s bloody hot outside (42ºC on Tuesday). Perhaps some of those present will connect the dots and say: Eureka! Global Warming!

Then, finally, along comes the hols. Unless there’s a parliamentary recall of course. The senior politicians still have a way to go, since July is a kind of half-way month.

Normally, Pedro Sánchez and his family would be looking forward to their August break in the Government-owned estate of La Moreta in Lanzarote, and who could blame them, but the conservative president of the island Astrid Pérez has said (while no doubt playing to the gallery) that he’s not welcome there this year.

Not to worry. Around 2014, Pedro’s wife Begoña Gomez bought a flat in Mojácar Pueblo – and frankly, we don’t see enough of them here.

Mind you, taking a breather when you’re the boss is always tricky, even when the thermometers are shattering and, if there’s no one else, we can see that the Americans remain on the case. Right now, as Trump cooks up some fresh idiocy or other, General Greenway says he wants to transfer the 3,250 US military service-folk from Rota and Morón (plus their families) in favour of Morocco.

Público says that it’s not just Trump who is angry with Spain, there’s also the colourful Argentinian leader Javier Milei, and the bloodthirsty leader of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. Between the three of them, plus their friend the Vox leader Santiago Abascal, maybe Sánchez would be wise to play it safe and remain in La Moncloa, the presidential palace in Madrid. Maybe hide under the bed. It’s also clear that he will be having to work (and plan) through his holiday if his government is going to continue until 2027.