The PP and Vox of the Valencia City Council voted this Monday against the motion presented by Compromís in which they requested that the honors and distinctions be withdrawn from the former mayor Rita Barberá after the final sentence that, last July, condemned the local PP for corruption in the Valencia municipality. Taula case.
Specifically, the Second Section of the Provincial Court of Valencia sentenced Alfonso Grau, former vice-mayor of Valencia during the terms of Rita Barberá, to four and a half years in prison and nine years of disqualification, for the crimes of embezzlement of public funds and corruption in the irregular financing of Rita Barberá’s electoral campaigns in 2007 and 2011. José Salinas, former director of the Valencian Tourism Foundation, was also sentenced, while María del Carmen García Fuster, former secretary of the Popular Municipal Group, and Juan Eduardo Santón, former director of the Center for Strategies and Development, were acquitted.
Compromís por València announced the convening of this extraordinary plenary session in July after the verdict was made public and asked the current PP mayor, María José Catalá, to apologize for the corruption of her party and to withdraw the honors dedicated to Rita Barberá, in reference to her declaration of mayor for life, as well as to her name from the Puente de las Flores. It also demanded that Catalá work to recover all the stolen money and prohibit contracting with companies linked to this corruption scheme.
“You don’t have to be very smart to see what all Valencians saw in 2015, that Mrs. X of corruption in Valencia was precisely its mayor: Mrs. Barberà. That Rita Barberà was not only aware of the corruption, but was its coordinator, through her right-hand man Alfonso Grau; administrator of corruption, through her brother-in-law José María Corbín; and benefactor of corruption, as a candidate for mayor of Valencia,” said the Valencian spokesperson, Papi Robles, in her speech.
“There is no reduction in the IBI that pays for the corruption of two decades of government of his party. That is why we ask you to return every last cent stolen from this city, to ask for forgiveness, to remove the honor of corruption and to maintain the image that has cost us so much to rebuild,” Robles asked.
In the same vein, socialist councilor Elisa Valía said that after the court’s decision, “no one doubts that Barberá was responsible for these lootings” and stressed that the PP had the possibility of “rectifying” and “not condemning” Valencia to reliving the darkest and most corrupt era of the democratic period.
However, this was not the case due to the absence of the municipal government parties, which avoided intervening, submitting the motion directly to the vote rejected with the votes of the PP and Vox councilors. “Today there was a debate about whether the corruption manifested in this city should be the subject of glory or censure. On the question of whether corruption is understood as a horror or as an honor. On whether we close the doors of the wall to corruption or put a bridge of money or flowers. It was a capital question. But, demonstrating their democratic spirit, PP and Vox avoided, side by side, the political debate,” Robles lamented at the end of the plenary session, which coincided with the debate by state of the city.
For his part, the municipal spokesman of the PP, Juan Carlos Caballero, reproached Compromís and the PSPV in the last round of interventions for their policy of “dirtying politics and trying to dirty it”, and defended that they will not withdraw the honors granted to Barberá because the former mayor “has never been convicted” and his “is a legacy of all Valencians”.
Caballero called on opposition members to “lose their heads” and “stop making fools of themselves,” while insisting that they would not “play their game” or withdraw the honors granted to the popular former mayor.
