An unexpected discovery promises to boost the investigation into Ana Millán, former mayor of Arroyomolinos and number 3 of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Madrid PP. On July 3, a former local councilor appeared at the headquarters of the Civil Guard and handed over a box containing diaries found in 2015 in the office that Millán had just left and that correspond to the years in which the current deputy secretary of organization of the Madrid PP awarded public contracts to a businessman who paid more than 200,000 euros to his sister, her husband and herself for different reasons.
For these payments, allegedly in exchange for public contracts, a judge in Navalcarnero accuses Millán of four corruption crimes. Despite the fact that the accusation had been hanging over her since March 2022, Díaz Ayuso chose Millán in 2023 to occupy a leading position on the PP list for the last regional elections. The election of Ana Millán as regional deputy forced the Navalcarnero magistrate to recuse herself in favor of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, before which Millán registered.
The box with the documentation, already incorporated into the file followed by the TSJM, contains 14 diaries, corresponding to all the years between 2004 and 2012. There are three other notebooks and 13 files in CD format. While waiting for its analysis and the conclusions reached by the investigators, it should be noted that the judicial file against Millán comes from the discovery of an email with a businessman that the government team that replaced the PP in 2015 found when entering the City Hall.
After four years of investigation, a judge from Navalcarnero concluded last June that the investigation revealed signs of influence peddling, corruption, embezzlement and fraud against the public administration by Ana Millán and businessman Francisco Roselló. The Civil Guard has already sent the documentation to the High Court of Justice of Madrid, which has appointed magistrate Francisco José Goyena to decide whether to continue the accusation against Millán now that she is a deputy and vice-president of the Assembly of Madrid.
Between 2008 and 2016, Francisco Roselló’s companies paid a total of 214,638.45 euros to Millán, his sister and her husband. According to the then councilor, Roselló paid a rent almost double the market price for a penthouse she owned. On the other hand, Millán’s sister and boyfriend were hired at different times by the businessman’s companies, which obtained in the same period more than 600,000 euros in public contracts from the ministry headed by the accused.
The June Storm
A summer storm is the cause of this turning point in the investigation. Or at least that is the beginning of the story before the Civil Guard of the former councilor of Arroyomolinos who went to the barracks with the box, whose cardboard appears to be damaged. At the end of June, the rains had caused a flood in the garage of his former colleague and friend Andrés Martínez Blanes, who was mayor of Arroyomolinos for Ciudadanos between August 2018 and June 2019, and who joined the government of Ana Millán in 2020 after the dissolution of the PP and Vox. Today, Martínez Blanes, after the debacle of Ciudadanos, is enjoying his retirement.
While cleaning the premises, the former mayor allegedly noticed a box that turned out to contain the documentation. On July 3, former councilor José Vicente Gil Suárez, a former colleague of Ciudadanos and later a member of Millán’s government team until his retirement, appeared mid-morning with the box at the Arroyomolinos barracks. Before the agents, Gil Suárez presented the version of the storm, the garage and the chance discovery, and added that he had offered to be the one to hand over to the investigators the discovery of his friend and former partner Andrés, who had an organized trip to the Alicante coast.
Gil Suárez assured the Civil Guards that “the said box had been lost after being delivered by Councilor Juan Carlos García González to former Mayor Andrés Martínez Blanes.” Former Mayor and Councilor Gil Suárez is no longer in politics, but Juan Carlos García González continues as a councilor, representing a local candidacy that governs Arroyomolinos with the Popular Party.
The 14 diaries found correspond to the years from 2004 to 2012. One per year except for those from 2007, which are three, and those from 2008, 2009 and 2011, which each have two diaries. The investigators will pay special attention to the two diaries from 2008. That year, Millán began to earn money from a company in Roselló for the rental of a penthouse that he owned in the center of Arroyomolinos. And in 2008, Roselló hired for the first time the sister of the councilor, a social worker, and the person who was her boyfriend at the time, now her husband and a small night entrepreneur and whom the businessman would have paid for his work as a school janitor.
Precisely, to this activity in “the hotel industry” and “the world of the night” Ana Millán attributed in her investigative statement before the Navalcarnero court the deposit of 52,950 euros in cash in the bank between 2008 and 2017 that caught the attention of the Central Operational Unit of the Civil Guard. According to Millán, her husband had cash income that she did not like to keep at home. Millán, promoted by Ayuso to the position of Vice-Secretary of Organization, left the Arroyomolinos City Hall in June 2023 to focus on her position as regional deputy and vice-president of the Assembly and number 3 of the PP of Madrid.
Three politicians and a box
To explain the transfer of the agendas from Ana Millán’s office to the Civil Guard barracks, we must turn to the recent history of Arroyomolinos and the changing nature of its local politics. In the story presented to the agents, two protagonists of this politics appear until just over a year ago: the owner of the garage, Andrés Martínez Blanes, and his friend Vicente Gil Suárez, who goes to the barracks. But there is a third, who once gave the box to Martínez Blanes and is still a city councilor today, Juan Carlos García González.
All three were part of the government team that expelled the PP from the Arroyomolinos City Council in 2015. The city of Madrid, which has experienced notable population growth in the last decade, opted for Ciudadanos and the then councilor Millán and the rest of the local Executive of the PP went into opposition. The three former Ciudadanos councilors were among the list of signatories to the complaint filed in 2016 with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which gave rise to the Millán case.
At the time of filing the complaint, the Púnica case had begun three years ago. What Ciudadanos found in three garbage bags, which Millán’s team was trying to get rid of, seemed to them to be linked to one of the lines of investigation of the biggest corruption case of the PP in the Community of Madrid.
The judicial chaos of the Púnica case meant that the National Court took four years to rule. In 2020, Judge Manuel Manuel García Castellón concluded that the Consistory’s alleged links to the investigated conspiracy were time-barred, but the indications that then-councilman Millán had benefited businessman Francisco Roselló were not. The judge sent the evidence back to a local court and that is how the Millán case began.
In 2019, the PP had recovered the Arroyomolinos government, already led by Ana Millán. But the agreement with Vox failed in 2020 and Millán turned to his old adversaries. The owner of the garage, Andrés Martínez Blanes, and the former councilman who went to the barracks with the box, Vicente Gil Suárez, were councilors for urban planning and finance respectively with Ana Millán until the last elections.
Martínez Blanes had previously been mayor for ten months. He replaced his colleague from Ciudadanos Carlos Ruipérez, who was accused in a corruption case and had to resign. Ruiperez was eventually exonerated. Martínez Blanes remained in power until the 2019 elections, in which the PP won with Ana Millán at its head. Over time, he would join Millán’s government.
elDiario.es contacted Juan Carlos García González, Andrés Martínez Blanes and José Vicente Gil Suárez. The first of them, García González, who is still an advisor in a coalition government with the PP, assures that he does not know what the boxes contain, although his colleagues describe his role as very active in the preparation of the 2016 elections. complaint to Anti-corruption, the result of the documentation seized in Millán.
José Vicente Gil Suárez told the Civil Guard that García González had delivered the box to Andrés Martínez Blanes during the ten months he was mayor. As he explained to this newspaper, the complaint for the Púnica case had already been filed and those documents did not seem relevant at that time. At that time, they did not know that their real interest was not in the relationship between Arroyomolinos and the businessman Juan Luis Huerta, accused before the National Court and now deceased, but in the relationship between Millán and the businessman Roselló.
Thus, according to Gil Suárez’s version corroborated by Martínez Blanes, he received the box and kept it at home, without giving it much importance. According to this story, the evidence against Millán known in the last two years did not make any of them think about the box with the diaries, until the rains and the flooding of the garage caused the former mayor Martínez Blanes to leave. in it.
