Javier Fernández-Lasquetty returns to the private education sector, where he had already landed during his previous step outside politics in 2015. The former economic guru of Isabel Díaz Ayuso has been appointed “director of continuing education” at the University of the Hesperides. This private and online center was recently launched by lobbyist and businessman Gabriel Calzada, founder and president of the Juan de Mariana Institute, the ultraliberal think tank that invited Argentine President Javier Milei to a tribute in Madrid in June.
Juan de Mariana is a shareholder in this private university based in the Canary Islands and linked to Madrid. Lasquetty’s new position appears in the note in which another ultraliberal lobby, Civismo, confirmed his appointment as administrator, as reported by elDiario.es. This is a new step in the network of relationships, lobbies and entities maintained by the new Madrid right in recent years.
“Madrid is the new Vienna,” proclaimed the eccentric Jesús Huerta de Soto long ago. Guru Milei and so-called anarcho-capitalismultra-catholic, muBillionaire and owner of an insurance company (España SA) inherited from his father and founded by his grandfather. Huerta de Soto has for years used his chair at a public university (Rey Juan Carlos) as a spokesperson for his “libertarian” ideas and the dismantling of the welfare state. And several of his former students are or have been linked to Juan de Mariana and associated satellites.
This is the “commendation” with which he honored Milei in June in Madrid. “In short, I dream of a world in which human beings are finally freed from the chains of statism and can choose God, if they wish, in complete freedom,” he said euphorically before launching into the already famous “Viva Libertad”. , damn it,” euphorically declared in front of Lasquetty, the deputy secretary of Economy of the PP, Juan Bravo, Santiago Abascal, Federico Jiménez Losantos or Daniel Lacalle.
Lasquetty, one of the architects of what they call “Madrid-style liberalism” and Esperanza Aguirre’s health privatizations, resigned in June 2023 as Minister of Finance and Economy of the Community of Madrid to devote himself to the private sector. Since then, he has accumulated a long list of signatures for various companies and entities.
“Whoever can make it happen, whoever can contribute, let him contribute,” said his former boss, José María Aznar, in November, when his appointment as advisor to billionaire Alicia Koplowitz in her SICAV was revealed. He then ended up at the pharmaceutical distributor Cofares. He became vice-president of institutional relations at the International Foundation for Freedom (FIL) of Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. And as head of the Foundation of the Illustrious Bar of Madrid (ICAM), which in March denounced the Prosecutor’s Office for revealing data refuting Miguel Ángel Rodríguez’s version of the tax crimes of Alberto González Amador, Ayuso’s partner.
All this, without hesitating to continue collecting from the public: the City Council of Las Rozas, a stronghold of the PP, appointed him at the beginning of the year as director of a municipal company that pays him a net allowance of 1,183.23 euros. per meeting, as he said. Today, the head of Aznar’s FAES (of which he was secretary general) joins the University of Las Hespérides and Civismo. This entity, whose president compares Pedro Sánchez to the Nazi propagandist Goebbels, has a board of directors very different from that of Juan de Mariana, where there is no businessman worthy of mention.
In Civismo, financed by ultra-rich people like Juan Abelló, Helena Revoredo, owner of Prosegur, or Víctor de Urrutia, the first fortune of Alava, all patrons of the foundation, the secretary general is Francisco Cabrillo, professor and former president of Libertad Digital. Ayuso has awarded him this year a public salary of more than 100,000 euros in the Chamber of Accounts chaired by Joaquín Leguina.
As in 2015
Today, Lasquetty and Calzada’s paths cross again at the University of the Hesperides. The Canarian was rector of the Francisco Marroquín University of Guatemala, a private center linked to the ultraliberal Mont Pélerin society, when in 2015 he appointed the former Madrid Minister of Finance or Health as vice-rector.
La Marroquín has had a campus in Madrid since 2018, but it is not on the list of universities of the Ministry of Education. The University of the Hesperides appears, which approved in 2019 (in the expectation of this legislature) an autonomous government of the Canary Islands Coalition and received final approval in March 2023, with the socialists still governing the archipelago.
The center has two physical offices in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In Madrid, it is associated with the OMMA business school, which is based in Juan de Mariana and was founded in 2012 by the Calzada family, responsible for Marroquín and, among others, Juan Rallo (former director of Juan de Mariana, former student of Huerta de Soto and dean of the Escuela Superior de los Hespérides) and Francisco García Paramés, a well-known investor and another ultra-rich person who financed Civismo.
Gabriel Calzada, known for denying climate change or defending the complete privatization of the health system, has worked in the private education sector for more than a decade. He was a professor at Rey Juan Carlos, where he obtained his doctorate in 2004 under the supervision of Huerta de Soto. His thesis was evaluated by Carlos Rodríguez Braun or Juan Iranzo, convicted for the “black cards”. In 2005, he founded the Juan de Mariana, which he has chaired since then. Between 2013 and 2021, he was rector of Marroquín.
The University of the Hesperides relies on a 100% online teaching model, but this summer it has also bet on face-to-face teaching. Taking advantage of the media attention of the “Freedom Dinner” in Madrid with Milei, he organizes, with Juan de Mariana, his summer courses in Puerto del Carmen (Lanzarote), with accommodation and leisure activities in the modest tourist establishments of the Calzada family area, subsidized by significant public aid.
At the University of the Hesperides, which did not respond to a request for information from elDiario.es, Calzada is rector and president. He is accompanied on the board of directors by, among others, his father, the tourist entrepreneur and former shipping company Gabriel Calzada Fiol (vice president), and his sister, Inés Calzada.
The latter worked in 2017 as a “project coordinator” in Juan de Mariana, as the institute explained at the time in response to a harsh text that one of its founders, the journalist Fernando Díaz Villanueva, had published after leaving his position. Under the title “Gabriel Calzada Institute (of Family Affairs)”, he said that “since its origins” everything in the center revolved around Calzada, “a Canarian zascandil, graft of lack and vanity, of ideas as small as his size. “, but with a lot of chatter and involved in the difficult task of doing politics without showing the wear and tear of active politics. ”
The text denounces “the proliferation of family members in positions of responsibility” at the institute. “What if the sister, what if the cousin, what if the girlfriend, what if the father with his club”… The think tank already (2017) “organized (and organizes) summer courses that took place in an “apart-hotel that the Calzada family owns in Lanzarote.
“Super durable”
Seven years later, the clan has launched its online university, with Lasquetty now on its team. Its vice-rector is another member of Juan de Mariana and co-founder of OMMA, Gonzalo Melián. An architect and doctor of economics (his thesis was co-directed by Gabriel Calzada and Huerta de Soto), he presented himself a few months ago to the Vox proposal in the Parliament of the Canary Islands to ensure that tourism there is “super sustainable” and that what the archipelago needs is to follow the model of the tax havens of Jersey or build mini nuclear reactorsold obsession of the far-right formation.
Another promoter of the University of the Hesperides is the Canarian businessman Oliver Alonso. He chairs an advisory board that includes, among others, the former president of CEOE Juan Rosell and the president of the Binter airline, Rodolfo Núñez.
The Domingo Alonso group, leader of the automobile sector in the archipelago (and which a few years ago hired the former PP minister José Manuel Soria as an advisor), is one of the Canarian companies in which this university offers internships in collaboration with the hotel company Binter. Lopesan, the Kalise refrigerator or Atlas Network. This ultraconservative and climate change denier lobby brings together dozens of libertarian think tanks with great influence in the United States and Latin America.
A recent report by the Multinational Observatory links it to billionaires and right-wing entities such as the Koch Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and Templeton, as well as large oil, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies. Among the entities with which it has collaborated is Juan de Mariana, whose general director is Manuel Llamas, Madrid’s deputy minister of Economy until Lasquetty left politics. The Juan de Mariana courses are promoted by a technology entrepreneur who has collected millions from the Administration in contracts and public aid.
