The day opened with the PSOE and the PP raging about their governments’ corruption cases and ended with the Supreme Court fulfilling the predictions of Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff.
Supreme Court opens trial against Attorney General for revealing secrets after Ayuso’s partner complains
It is a typical joke among journalists to imagine a new and embarrassing question from which the person being questioned will not be able to escape unscathed. Something like: did he sleep with a goat? If the politician denies out of scandal, which is very likely, the headline is already cooked: So-and-so denies having had sex with a goat. In a very large body. From then on, it is possible that every time so-and-so’s name appears, people will not remove from their minds the image of the title and something else. He denied it, but we already know that politicians don’t always tell the truth, right?
This is what Alberto Núñez Feijóo came to do during Wednesday’s control session. The weather was stormy and turned into a force five hurricane that swept away the remnants of decency of some parliamentarians. The leader of the PP began his intervention with this question: “Mr. Sánchez, could you tell the Spaniards how many times, where and what you or your wife spoke with Mr. Víctor de Aldama, currently in prison? It’s like the goat affair, but linked to the Koldo affair.
Aldama is one of the protagonists in this corruption scandal, who was arrested and imprisoned for another alleged fraud. It looks like a very neat piece. Until June 26 of this year, he chaired the Zamora Football Club which plays in the First Federation, the former Second Division B. Things are not going well in this league. He is fifteenth in the standings after eight matches. However, it has fewer defeats (four) than the cars belonging to Aldama and its companies (six). Namely, a Ferrari Portofino, a Ferrari F 12, a Range Rover, a Porsche Macan, a Volkswagen Golf R 32 and an Audi A-8. The first two cars combined do not go below half a million euros.
Pedro Sánchez did not answer the question directly – this is not a very common habit during the control session – because he was not going to fall into the trap either. The judicial summary contains no evidence of personal contact between Sánchez and Aldama, although this is what worries Feijóo the least. The president had prepared the response, as did the ministers of his government: “Head up a little, because from Ayuso’s A to Zaplana’s Z, you have a case of corruption for each letter of the alphabet. »
Up to eight MPs from the Popular Party focused their questions on denouncing corruption. The ministers interviewed were instructed to respond by reciting the list of corruption cases in which PP leaders were involved. Vice President María Jesús Montero started and five other ministers followed: “Gürtel, Púnica, Lezo, Kitchen, Palma Arena, Bárcenas, Campeón, Fabra, Fitur, Auditorio, Tándem, Erial, Nursery, Acuamed, Mercamadrid, Arroyomolinos, yesterday Zaplana.”
The Corruption “Hall of Fame” PP. The list was not exhaustive. The two and a half minutes of an intervention in a control session are not enough. The creativity in the misappropriation of public funds by this party has reached levels that are difficult to surpass. It reached even the most sacred, as it is said in these cases, with the attempt to accept bribes for the organization of the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Valencia in 2006. Like the indulgences of the Middle Ages , but modernized.
The control session was the apotheosis of “whataboutism”, a parliamentary custom present for years and which consists of asking your rival what about yours, what is also often called “and you more” . No one resists the temptation to use it.
María Jesús Montero speaks to journalists at Congress from a wheelchair due to a cast on her foot.
The calendar played a trick on the PP. The session was held one day after Eduardo Zaplana was sentenced to ten years in prison for corruption. President of the Valencian Government until 2002, minister of Aznar, parliamentary spokesperson of the party and then appointed director of Telefónica with a salary of 800,000 euros, Zaplana has demonstrated great consistency throughout his political career : “I won a lot of money. “I need a lot of money to live,” he previously declared in his best contribution to the values of the Valencian PP.
Zaplana no longer exists for his party. The socialists point out that they still have “38 trials” for corruption cases.
During the session, the PP took pains to call Sánchez “number one,” the code name that Aldama used in some conversations during the investigation into the Koldo case. “All roads lead to you,” Feijóo told him. Cuca Gamarra spoke of “bags of money circulating through Ferraz”, referring to information from anonymous media sources on which the PP relied to file a complaint against the PSOE before the National Court. This is a complaint that, according to El Mundo, will lead to nothing and will not be admitted for processing.
For the entertainment section, there is the comment of the journalist who signed the article used by the PP and who declared on television that her media “at no time spoke of irregular financing of the socialist party because she did not “There is no indication that this happened.” . “produced like this.”
It remains a mystery why Feijóo called a meeting of the PP leadership on a Sunday to decide to present a complaint the next day that would go nowhere. Could it be that he wants to give the impression that he is reacting harshly to the latest revelations about the Koldo affair and the involvement of José Luis Ábalos, for whom the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office has already requested his indictment. Either that or he was just improvising.
The government on Wednesday faced the Supreme Court’s decision to investigate the state’s attorney general for a possible crime of revealing secrets. Contrary to what the PP of Madrid had denounced, it is not because of the statement with which the prosecutor’s office wanted to respond to the false information promoted by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez and published by El Mundo. Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s chief of staff tried to present the president’s friend, who had already admitted to having committed two tax crimes, as the victim of the actions of the prosecution.
The Supreme Court investigation will be carried out into the alleged leak of emails in which Alberto González Amador’s lawyer admitted to the crimes and offered to agree on an admission of guilt.
To our knowledge, these emails were in a prosecutor’s office mailbox to which 18 people, most of them prosecutors, have access. How many prosecutors have now been indicted? Second, everyone’s boss and the Attorney General of Madrid.
The Second Chamber of the Supreme Court affirms that in this leak there is “a charge of prejudice which affects the possible violation of the right of defense” of González Amador. It is an example of the creativity of certain magistrates that we consider that the defense is harmed because we know that the same defense has recognized that the client is guilty of at least two crimes.
In other words, the Supreme Court decides to investigate the Attorney General for allegedly doing what judges all over Spain have been doing for years in corruption investigations, without these leaks being pursued . They always said it was very difficult to find the person responsible, even though there were very few suspects.
There will be those who think there was no doubt that something like this would happen from the moment Rodríguez said it had already happened. This is “moving forward,” he announced in several tweets. And he has been saying it for a long time, implying that Ayuso’s revenge would be terrible against those who had dared to investigate his partner’s crimes.
Correction: Aldama is no longer president of the Zamora Football Club, as a first version of the article said. He resold it on June 26, 2024 for 1.9 million.
