In 2009, for the PP of Andalusia, it was “an incompatibility like a great cathedral”. We are talking about the presence of relatives of public representatives in the company Mina de Aguas Teñidas SA (MATSA). If 15 years ago, and in the following years, Javier Arenas, then leader of the Andalusian Popular Party, severely attacked the former president of the Junta, then third vice-president of Rodríguez Zapatero in the Spanish government, Manuel Chaves, for not having, after having inhibited himself in the approval of aid of 10.1 million euros to the said company of which at that time his daughter Paula Chaves was the representative, henceforth “he “there is no incompatibility” in the opinion of the Council.
Even the young deputy Juan Manuel Moreno asked the then Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, Miguel Sebastián, during the government control session in Congress on May 27, 2009, to know the criteria for granting mining aid in Andalusia. “Doesn’t Manuel Chaves know his daughter’s name?” quipped Juan Manuel Moreno. “What is absolutely shameful is that Mr. Chaves uses the Junta de Andalucía as if it were a farm and we are already tired of prioritizing family and friends and that is not the first time that the scandal broke out with his daughter or one of his brothers,” declared the man who would become president of Andalusia ten years later.
It is worth remembering, as reported these days by this newspaper, that the territorial delegate in Huelva of the Department of Sustainability and Environment of the Junta of Andalusia, Pedro Yórquez Sancha, signed on August 28 the environmental authorization for a pond of 15 million m3 of water. toxic waste in the municipality of Cortegana that the mining company Sandfire-MATSA plans to build, a company where his brother has worked for around ten years.
Pedro Yórquez Sancha was appointed territorial delegate of the ministry on September 7, 2022. He thus acquired the status of senior official of the Junta de Andalucía chaired by Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla (PP). His brother had then held various positions within the mining company MATSA for around ten years, depending on his professional profile. The Council Delegation chaired by Juan Manuel Moreno told this media “from a legal point of view, there is no incompatibility” because the family member “is not a senior official of the company, he also did not present the project and he is not in the zone of the company concerned. “There is no conflict of interest or incompatibility in its administrative treatment,” MATSA also said.
It should also be remembered that the law of incompatibility of senior officials of the Junta de Andalucía establishes that these positions “are obliged to recuse themselves from knowledge of the matters in whose office they have intervened or which concern companies, entities or companies in the direction of which, they, their spouse, their de facto partner registered in the corresponding Register or a person of their family in the second civil degree would have had any part in matters of advice or administration.
Well, the MATSA company, as has been said, was already at the center of the news since 2009, when El Mundo discovered this million dollar aid for the construction of a mineral processing plant in Valdelamusa, which was reported barely a month later by Zapatero. he signed Chaves and left the presidency of the Council 19 years later. His replacement, José Antonio Griñán, decided not to open a sanction file against his predecessor and the PP took the matter to the Supreme Court, which ultimately denied the PP active judicial legitimacy to demand that the Council sanction its representatives.
“The socialists believe that by winning the elections they have the right to do anything, including breaking the law and misusing public resources as if they were private property of the PSOE,” Arenas said at the time while Chaves defended in the Congress of Deputies. Finally, in 2018, the TSJA forced MATSA to return this aid plus interest after the 2014 Board of Directors, already chaired by Susana Díaz, demanded its repayment.
Another well-known episode in Andalusia was the cancellation in 2017 by the TSJA, then ratified by the Supreme Court in 2019, of a mining concession in 2014 to MATSA in two municipalities of Huelva (Paymogo and Puebla de Guzmán) when Paula Chaves occupied the territory. position of director of the legal sector and institutional relations. The courts, which partially accepted the appeal of the mining company Emerita Resources (the same which brought the “Aznalcóllar case” to court) and which had felt wronged in the call for tenders awarded in first instance to MATSA, have decided to resume the procedure. to the evaluation of open and accepted offers “once the generic evaluation criteria have been excluded because they are contrary to the law”.
This also aroused anger among the popular ranks. Mine management “smells bad” for “many years,” Juan Manuel Moreno, already president of the Andalusian PP, declared in 2015 when this affair was revealed.
As this newspaper also reported, the deposit of mining waste that the Régie has just authorized is, however, planned on land which has lost its special protection after an agreement signed by the company and a mayor who is now general manager from Protected Natural. Regions of Andalusia.
