Meetings at the headquarters of Torreal, the company of billionaire Juan Abelló; an action plan which includes “the defense of private property against housing squatting”; and an award for former National Court judge Manuel García Castellón for “honoring justice as a fundamental pillar of our democracy.”
These are some of the latest movements of the Fundación Civismo, a think tank financed by the ultra-rich like Abelló or the owner of Prosegur, Helena Revoredo, and whose president, the Navarrese lobbyist Julio Pomés, has even compared Pedro Sánchez to the Goebbels Nazis. . The entity, which celebrates each year what it describes as “tax liberation day”, has just sent its partners the invitation to the award ceremony for its annual “Civil Society” prize.
This year, it was the turn of the former magistrate, who retired in September due to his age and known for his closeness to the PP. After refusing to indict María Dolores de Cospedal in the Kitchen affair after the former PP secretary general’s attempts to sabotage the PP’s corruption cases, García Castellón has to his credit his unsuccessful attempts to prosecute several men Podemos policies. Until this year, he insisted on accusing Carles Puigdemont of terrorism, whom he had tried to accuse during the negotiations for Sánchez’s inauguration.
The former judge was the instructor in the so-called Villarejo case. last summer proposed to judge BBVA and its former presidentFrancisco González, for hiring the corrupt commissioner to spy on, among others, the former president of Sacyr Luis del Rivero or Juan Abelló himself.
“Exceptional career”
“This year, we wanted to honor justice as a fundamental pillar of our democracy. For this reason, the Civismo Foundation will award this Civil Society Prize 2024 to Judge Manuel García-Castellón, with an exceptional career as president of the Central Court of Instruction number 6 and as a member of the National Court”, reads- on in the registration form. to assist. to the document that he sent to his partners and to which elDiario.es had access.
In previous editions, the Civic Prize was awarded to the current president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, or to the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Last year, the chosen one was Jano García, ultraliberal writer, YouTuber, former professional poker player and occasional collaborator of the communicator Iker Jiménez, who these days has started spreading hoaxes about the DANA of Valencia in its program on Mediaset.
The Civismo Prize to García Castellón will be presented on November 28 at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of the Renta 4 Foundation in Madrid, this investment bank was founded by another Civismo donor, the financier and state lawyer on leave Juan Carlos Ureta.
The Renta 4 Foundation was one of the names that appeared among Civismo’s donors in 2020, the last year in which this foundation detailed in its accounts who finances its activity. Then the names of Torreal SA, of Abelló, also appeared. The eighth Spanish fortune according to Forbes, with a net worth of 2.9 billion, is one of the billionaires who have joined the trend of free investment companies (SIL) to pay 1% taxes after the strengthening of controls on mutual funds .
Alongside Abelló, among these donors to Civismo were two other names from the famous Forbes Spain list: the president of Prosegur, very close like Abelló to the king emeritus, Juan Carlos I, former director of Endesa or Mediaset and who is the thirtieth fortune in the country, according to this publication, which attributes to him 1.2 billion in assets; and Víctor de Urrutia, owner of the CVNE wineries, former vice-president of Iberdrola, the first fortune in Alava and in 72nd place in this ranking of the rich.
Other lesser-known billionaires were also on the list of donors to Civismo, such as Víctor Ruiz, also a patron of the foundation and who is the largest shareholder of Azkoyen, founder of the bankrupt engineering company Eurofinsa and former shareholder of Libertad Digital; the investor Francisco García Paramés (owner of another ultra think tank in Madrid, the Juan de Mariana Institute), or the financier Claudio Aguirre, cousin of Esperanza Aguirre and also patron of Civismo.
The Vargas Llosa Foundation also appeared, of which Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, also close to Juan de Mariana, is director. Lasquetty was Ayuso’s economic guru until 2023 and is considered the architect of Aguirre’s health privatizations in the Community of Madrid. Already fully involved in the private sector and in various lobbies, he joined the board of directors of Civismo last summer.
A few months earlier, on December 5, the current Civismo action plan was approved. This document foresees income from “private contributions” of 234,000 euros for this year and, among the planned actions, a new edition of the so-called “School of Freedom” at the María Cristina University Center of the Escorial Monastery, and various conferences. and gatherings.
As the first of its actions, the plan plans to carry out this year “research” work on “the strategic sectors that make up Spain’s GDP and the economic value of public and private investments in the social, educational and cultural sectors, the defense of private rights. property versus housing squatting, the effectiveness of tax reforms, the labor market situation, the necessary independence of the judiciary and the development of the Economic Freedom Index of Spain.
The documentation to which elDiario.es had access shows that, although Civismo has its own headquarters (currently located on Paseo de la Habana in Madrid), board meetings were held until a year ago in the offices of. Torreal, the holding company of Abelló, at number 1 Fortuny Street in Madrid.
The November 15 meeting was convened there to approve the 2024 Action Plan; or the one who approved the 2022 accounts on April 14, 2023, when the entity ended up making a record expenditure of 304,677 euros, according to its accounts for that year; or the one who, on June 30, 2022, elected Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández as the new director of the foundation. This regular contributor to the Disenso foundation, Vox’s think tank, spent a little over a year in this position.
He was replaced in September 2023 as general director by Albert Guivernau, who a few months earlier was number two on the Barcelona city hall lists for Valents, a defunct and ephemeral conservative and constitutionalist party.
Civismo was also financed by not too well-known ultra-rich people like the Huartes, heirs of the Navarrese builder Félix Huarte, who manufactured gold during the dictatorship and built the Valley of the Fallen and the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. The think tank was originally closely linked to Navarra, but eventually settled in Madrid.
Its headquarters in the capital was for years adjacent to the Huarte building, on Paseo de la Castellana and a stone’s throw from the Bernabéu. From there, a huge banner against Pedro Sánchez was deployed in May 2020, which was taken up on his networks by a then little-known tweeter named Alvise Pérez.
The entity that brought the most money to Civismo in 2020 was Alpireva Investments SL, owned by French fruit and vegetable businessman Alexandre Pierron D’Arbonne, vice-president of the think tank and closely linked in Navarre. His profile presents certain parallels with that of another French billionaire living in Spain, Grégoire Bontoux-Halley, heir to Carrefour who injected millions into the heiress of the far-right channel Intereconomía TV.
Another person closely linked to Civismo for years is Carlos Espinosa de los Monteros, former commissioner of Marca España and father of former Vox MP Iván Espinosa de los Monteros. The secretary general of the foundation is Complutense professor Francisco Cabrillo, whom Ayuso appointed in March director of the Chamber of Accounts of the Community of Madrid together with former president Joaquín Leguina, with a public salary of 101,059.32 euros per year .
Cabrillo had already been appointed by Aguirre in 2004 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”), Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando del Pino (from the family that owns Ferrovial), José María Rotellar, current part-time advisor to the Madrid government , or even Ignacio Ruiz-Jarabo, former director of the Tax Agency under Aznar and columnist in 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), the economist Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós, the former diplomat Inocencio Arias, the professors Benito Arruñada and Rafael Pampillón, Luis María Linde, former governor of the Bank of Spain to the PP, and Fernando Eguidazu, advisor to the supervisor and senior foreign official to Mariano Rajoy.
