Former deputy director and current studies coordinator of the Juan de Mariana Institute, the ultraliberal think tank that honored Argentine President Javier Milei last June in Madrid, actively campaigns in favor of foreign vulture funds that are pursuing Spain in justice for cuts in renewable energies by the Mariano Rajoy government.
The latest example is that of Iruñe Ariño, deputy director of the IJM from November 2018 to August 2021, when she became an advisor to the Minister of Economy and Finance of the Community of Madrid, Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s economic guru until he left politics a little over a year ago.
After ceasing to be an advisor to Lasquetty in January 2023, Ariño last year founded a public affairs consultancy, Agenda Actual, responsible for organizing the famous dinner with Milei that brought together businessmen and politicians from the PP and Vox at the Casino de Madrid.
Agenda Actual has also been hired by funds filing lawsuits against Spain. Last week, Ariño sent a press release in which he announced that “British justice rejects Spain’s appeal in one of the renewable energy allocations worth 101 million euros”, the Antin affair.
This is one of the condemnations pronounced by the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), dependent on the World Bank. The debt associated with this dispute was purchased in 2017 by the American opportunistic fund Centerbridge from the French fund Antin.
Ariño, with whom elDiario.es contacted without receiving a response, sent another statement to the media in August in which she assured: “237 million in public debt, on the verge of technical default due to government cuts in renewable energy Rajoy”, becoming echo the demands of a group of people “affected” by budget cuts carried out by another American company, Blasket Renewable Investments.
The note on this decision of the British justice has been reproduced ipso facto Thursday Libertad Digital, the media of Federico Jiménez Losantos from which the majority of the members of the current management of the IJM come, starting with its current director, Manuel Llamas, former vice-minister of the Economy at Lasquetty. The news from Libre Mercado was signed by the journalist and economic analyst Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, current “Studies Coordinator” of Juan de Mariana.
Author of the book Madrid-style liberalismin his articles on the Losantos portal, Sánchez de la Cruz paid particular attention to arbitrations, with information on how the PP “monopolizes” the government for certain penalties derived from Rajoy’s reductions; or how this “scandal” and this legal insecurity “sink” foreign investments in Spain.
On the Juan de Mariana website, Sánchez de la Cruz described this process as “a series of incomprehensible offenses that have been perpetrated by the government of our country and that have hit dozens of foreign companies.” “Whoever signed these lines considered that the compensation offered to the sector was absolutely exaggerated, but this waste was as wrong as the decision to retroactively withdraw the aid was aberrant.”
He also linked “non-payments to the renewable energy sector” to the rise in energy prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this article, he denounces the “slowdown in the development of the nuclear sector” and the veto on hydraulic fracturing.
Three weeks before presenting the Juan de Mariana Prize to Milei, Sánchez de la Cruz accompanied representatives of foreign funds suing for reduction of renewable energy to demand, during an event in a Madrid hotel, an agreement with the current executive who pays the million-dollar compensation they are demanding.
A website was presented there which sets out the figures for the Spanish debt in these proceedings: 1,500 million in “unpaid premiums”, 50 international investors affected and 73 million spent on consultants and lawyers for what they describe as “the fiasco of Spain with renewable energies.
It is worth remembering that thirty years ago, in 2009, the Canarian lobbyist and businessman César Calzada, founder and today still president of the IJM, known for denying climate change and now active in the sector of private education, published a report questioning the effectiveness of bonuses. for clean energy in the United States. This report, in which Barack Obama focused on the Spanish renewable energy sector, then leading, had a certain resonance at the international level.
In 2013, Rajoy’s government, with José Manuel Soria as Minister of Industry, drastically reduced this aid, thus causing this cataract of demands which still persists today. As it turns out, in 2017, another think tank chaired by Calzada and currently inactive, the Atlantic Institute of Economic and Social Studies, He brought the canary Soria out of his ostracism with an event in Gran Canaria after the scandal of his resignation following his appearance in the Panama Papers.
Today, people linked to the IJM work alongside the funds suing Spain over the Soria budget cuts.
Sources from the Ministry of Ecological Transition emphasize that the vast majority of allocations are in the hands of speculative “vulture funds” which acquired the rights from the initial complainants. And that Spain managed to reduce the requested amount by 85%. “Out of claims of 10.635 million, the compensation recorded amounts to 1.476 million. » There are still 1.447 million issues waiting to be resolved.
From the department still headed by Teresa Ribera, it is added that in these procedures “Spain and the European Commission are fully aligned”. They recall that in April the EU as a whole decided to abandon the Energy Charter Treaty, the investment protection agreement which covers these arbitration complaints, believing that its application would prevent the achievement of the objectives EU environmental policies and would hamper governments’ climate action with multi-million dollar demands to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
Regarding this alleged non-payment of public debt reported by Irune Ariño, the ministry indicates that “the Kingdom of Spain is not aware of any possible judicial notification and no investor has been concerned about this issue; In reality, these are exchange rate programs whose conditions provided for a default on the public debt which cannot be assimilated to arbitrage.”
With the CEOE
In the case of Sánchez de la Cruz, the economist is CEO of a think tank, Intelligent Regulation Forum, with which elDiario.es contacted without receiving a response. He has worked diligently with the CEOE’s Institute for Economic Studies (IEE). For example, he was responsible for adapting into Spanish for the Spanish business think tank the economic freedom indices prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a lobby that promotes the re-election of Donald Trump and is considered the most influential center of ultra-conservative thinking in the United States.
For her part, Irune Ariño graduated in political and administrative sciences from Pompeu Fabra University and has collaborated in various media. His signing as advisor to Lasquetty public Sánchez de la Cruz on the Losantos portal. There he had a salary of 62,705.5 euros per year. His firm defines itself as “a public affairs consulting and communications agency that thinks outside the box.” Among the rare clients who appear on his website are the economist Juan Rallo (former director of the IJM), Juan de Mariana or the International Foundation for Freedom, of Mario Vargas Llosa, of which Lasquetty is director.
Co-author and coordinator of the trial Dismantling hegemonic feminismIn the 2016 general elections, Ariño was a candidate for Castellón for the Libertarian Party, which received 3,103 votes in those elections. She was director of Student For Liberty (SFL) in Spain and Portugal. He taught at private universities like Francisco Marroquín, another of his consultancy’s few clients, with a campus in Madrid (although it is not accredited as a university) and whose founder Juan de Mariana, along with Lasquetty , served as rector in Guatemala as vice-chancellor.
Canary Islander Calzada, a disciple like Milei of professor and billionaire tycoon Jesús Huerta de Soto, took over health privatization ideologue Esperanza Aguirre for a recently launched online (and private) university, including IJM is a shareholder. , an entity that is supposed to be non-profit.
Last summer, the Calzada family’s subsidized tourism businesses in the Canary Islands began doing business again with the institute’s summer courses and this new university, taking advantage of the attraction of Milei’s visit to Madrid . Tech entrepreneur Fernando Monera, whose consultancy firm has received millions of euros in public contracts and grants, was responsible for promoting the event to the Argentine president.
