Record spending in 2022, more than a million euros in income since 2019 and Prosegur, Juan Abelló and a cousin of Esperanza Aguirre among its donors. These are data from the accounts of the Fundación Civismo, a lobby that has just recruited Javier Fernández-Lasquetty as a patron and whose president, Julio Pomés, compared Pedro Sánchez to the Nazi Goebbels.
The entity, which has on its board of directors Abelló, the owner of the multinational private security company Helena Revoredo, and the financier Claudio Aguirre, cousin of the former Madrid president, does not publish economic data on its activity on its website.
elDiario.es has had access to its accounts from 2020 to 2022, filed in the Registry of Foundations of the Community of Madrid, where it is registered, and which reflect that between 2019 and 2022 its income (mainly private donations) amounted to 1,096,849.54 euros.
Meanwhile, their expenses amounted to 936,180.44 euros. They went from zero euros in 2018 to a record 304,677 euros in 2022, where there is a significant gap in expenses compared to the 245,000 euros initially budgeted.
In 2021, its income rose to 417,662.63 euros, compared to 280,638.91 euros in 2020, the last year in which its accounts detailed the donations received: 253,779 euros from legal entities and an additional 21,275 euros from 17 individuals without identification.
Among the companies, the largest contribution in 2020 (50,000 euros) came from Alpireva Investments SL, a holding company that, according to information from the commercial registry available through Insight View, belongs to the French fruit and vegetable businessman Alexandre Pierron D’Arbonne, vice-president of Civic Affairs and very linked to Navarre, like the foundation.
The second donor in 2020, with 30,000 euros, was Asua Inversiones SL, from another patron of Civismo, Víctor de Urrutia, the first fortune of Álava. Major shareholder of the CVNE wineries, former vice-president of Iberdrola or partner of the giant of private education Proeduca Altus (International University of La Rioja), Urrutia has just acquired 5% of LLYC, one of the main consulting and lobbying companies in Spain.
In 2020, Víctor Ruiz Rubio contributed 20,000 euros to Civismo Inverlasa, founder of the bankrupt engineering company Eurofinsa (shareholder of Libertad Digital), the main shareholder of Azkoyen and with strong interests in the Madrid brick. And another 20,000 euros were donated by Armor Acquisitions SA, from Prosegur Cash, a cash subsidiary of the private security giant. In 2023, this company was absorbed by Juncadella Prosegur Internacional SL, according to its latest annual accounts.
The Citizenship and Values Foundation (Funciva), a think tank promoted by the professor of philosophy of law and former PP deputy Andrés Ollero and the former PSOE parliamentarian Javier Paniagua, a supporter of a grand coalition between these two parties, also contributed $20,000 euros in 2020.
The Open Value Foundation also contributed, promoted by the famous investor Francisco García Paramés, one of the heads of the OMMA Business School, a business school closely linked to the new right in Madrid. This private center gives its headquarters in the capital to the Juan de Mariana Institute (the ultra think tank that invited Javier Milei on his last visit to Madrid) and is associated with the Francisco Marroquín University, a private center in Guatemala of which Lasquetty was vice-rector in 2015 and has a campus in the capital.
Torreal SA, the holding company of Juan Abelló, contributed 10,000 euros to Civismo in 2020. A historic figure in the ranking of the largest Spanish fortunes, the Council of Ministers vetoed this Tuesday, due to “risks to national security”, the takeover bid by a Hungarian group close to the extreme right Viktor Orbán for Talgo.
Talgo’s three main partners, Torreal, the Trilantic fund and the Oriol family, owners of 40.22% via a vehicle in Luxembourg, have been trying to sell for years and have shown themselves to be in favour of the public purchase offer, which values Talgo at 619 million and entailed a premium of 41% on the price of the half-year preceding its presentation.
The Renta 4 Foundation, of the investment bank headed by financier Juan Carlos Ureta, and Timac Agro SA, a Navarrese fertilizer company belonging to the French Roullier group, also contributed 10,000 euros to Civismo in 2020. With lower figures, we find Arofa SL (6,000 euros), a fruit and vegetable company belonging to the Navarrese Arotzarena family, or, with 5,000 euros, Mármara Capital SL, the largest shareholder (20.41%) of Altamar CAM Parterns, the investment company chaired by Claudio Aguirre.
Esperanza Aguirre’s cousin, linked to real estate speculation operations in Madrid or Barcelona, is also the director of Prosegur Cash. There, she coincides with the Revoredos, one of whose heirs (Chantal Revoredo) hides investments of several million dollars in the Cayman Islands from the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV). Or with Ana Sainz de Vicuña Bemberg, one of the largest Spanish fortunes and shareholder of Altamar through one of her companies, Miscante H1 España (5.34%).
Married, Vargas Llosa and Vox candidate
Among Civismo’s donors in 2020 were also, already with small amounts, the International Foundation for Freedom (FIL), chaired by the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa and of which Lasquetty is vice-president (350 euros); or, with 200 euros, the Spanish Liberal Club, to which, according to its website, the former leader of the PP, Pablo Casado, or the also vice-president of Civism, Pedro Schwartz, among other self-proclaimed liberals, belong.
With 100 euros, Poland Invest Real Estate, a real estate company created in 2017 by Rodolfo Alústiza, a former ultra-Carlist candidate who in 2019 was head of the Vox list for the Congress of Navarre.
In 2021, after increasing its revenues by 48% in one year, Civismo stopped specifying its donors, but entered in its accounts 9,514.15 euros of “financial aid” from the “Institute of Economics”. [sic]whose name refers to a veteran British lobby group with a conservative orientation, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).
In its 2022 accounts, it recorded 326,624.57 euros deposited at Bankinter. That year, it organizes events in Pamplona with Rosa Díez and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo to present their books. Models And Politically undesirable. And with Lasquetty, then still an advisor to Ayuso, and his conference “More freedom and fewer taxes. Why has the economy of the Community of Madrid grown?”
It was, Civismo explains in its memoirs, “a call that tried to respond to the economic growth of the Spanish capital and the need for more freedom and fewer stifling taxes for Spanish citizens.” The entity counts among its best-known studies its “Tax Freedom Day”, when it calculates that a Spaniard stops paying taxes every year.
Civismo carries out “all types of activities aimed at promoting freedom in the Spanish economy and society”. With a basic endowment of 30,000 euros, its statutes indicate that no administrator will receive any remuneration for the activities carried out in favour of the Foundation since these are honorary functions, with the exception of travel expenses to attend meetings or other expenses that may be incurred in the fulfilment of any specific mission entrusted to them on behalf of or in the interest of the Foundation.
However, the Board of Trustees may set an “adequate” remuneration for employers who provide services other than those involved in the exercise of this function.
The entity announced the signing of Lasquetty in a note on August 4, reported by elDiario.es. It stressed that in his career as a “civil servant”, the former director of José María Aznar’s FAES “has distinguished himself by a multidisciplinary approach and by the implementation of innovative public policies, always with a perspective of defending individual freedom and private initiative.”
Since its creation, the foundation has had Pomés as its president, a doctor in chemistry who went from teaching at the Public University of Navarra to a reconversion as a lobbyist at the beginning of the century. First with a think tank (Institución Futuro), then with Civismo, whose first headquarters was for a few years in Navarra, to which he is closely linked: his brother, Javier Pomés, a former MEP for the UPN-PP, accepted a 16-year term. sentence in 2018. months in prison for extortion of goods by helping an Arab sheikh avoid a million-dollar debt to Social Security.
Shortly after, it emerged that Julio Pomés had asked businessmen in Navarre by letter for money to finance a report that was against the government then led by Uxue Barcos, a left-wing nationalist. The current director of Civic Affairs, Albert Guivernau, was number two in 2023 on the Barcelona city council lists for Valents, a defunct and short-lived conservative and constitutionalist party.
In addition to its links with Abelló, Revoredo and other ultra-rich people such as the Huartes, heirs of the Navarrese builder Félix Huarte, who produced gold during the dictatorship and built the Valley of the Fallen, or Carlos Espinosa de los Monteros, former commissioner of the Spain Brand, Civismo has close relations with the Ayuso government, to which it awarded its annual prize in 2021 for making the Community of Madrid a “bastion of freedom”.
Its secretary general is a Complutense professor, Francisco Cabrillo, whom Ayuso appointed in March as advisor to the Chamber of Accounts of the Community of Madrid, alongside former president Joaquín Leguina. Cabrillo earns a public salary of 101,059.32 euros per year in this position. In 2004, he was appointed by Aguirre as president of the Economic and Social Council of the Community of Madrid. Shortly after his resignation (in 2012), he briefly chaired Libertad Digital.
Among the people who have advised Civismo are Daniel Lacalle (former “head of strategy”), Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando del Pino (from the family that owns Ferrovial), José María Rotellar, currently a part-time advisor to the government of Madrid, or Ignacio Ruiz-Jarabo, former director of the Tax Agency under Aznar and columnist in the right-wing media.
This long list also includes CEOE historians José Luis Feito and Juan Iranzo, convicted of the Caja Madrid black cards; Fernando Becker (former director of Iberdrola and closely linked to the PP), economist Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós, former diplomat Inocencio Arias, professors Benito Arruñada and Rafael Pampillón, Luis María Linde, former governor of the Bank of Spain in the PP, and Fernando Eguidazu, advisor to the supervisor and senior foreign official with Mariano Rajoy.
