Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, during his time as acting Minister of Economy, Finance and Employment of the Community of Madrid.Alejandro Martínez Vélez (Europa Press)
―Has your income improved compared to your last stage as a director [when you earned more than 100,000 euros gross annually]?
-Yeah.
Javier Fernández-Lasquetty (Madrid, 57 years old) answers in writing the questions from EL PAÍS with the condition that his answers are reproduced in their entirety.
Three months have already passed since this graduate in Law and Political Science, who together with Enrique Ossorio was the ideological lighthouse of the first governments of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, left politics.
And he hasn't wasted any time.
In this short period he has been appointed president of Cofares Diversificación, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical distributor Cofares;
member of the board of directors of Morinvest, the investment company chaired by Alicia Koplowitz;
He has joined the advisory board of Sagardoy Abogados;
He has taught in various master's degrees at different universities;
and has just signed for the board of directors of a municipal company in Las Rozas, where the PP, his party, has been governing since 1995. For this work he will receive 1,183.23 euros net as per diem for each of the around ten meetings that you will have to attend every year, according to a spokesperson for the entity.
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“The mayor [José de la Uz] asked me to join a council that includes business executives,” explains Fernández-Lasquetty.
“What interests me about Las Rozas Innova is that it serves to promote start-ups and to connect them with companies that seek innovation.
“I think I can help the council strategically guide the activity for that purpose,” he continues.
“I don't know everything about diets,” she adds.
“I have neither asked nor have they told me.
I don't know anything about them, so I don't even know if I will perceive them.
Of course, the amount you say is not a reason for me to have accepted the mayor's proposal.”
However, his landing in this public company shortly after leaving the regional Administration has not left the left-wing opposition indifferent.
“The privatization gurus of the PP follow the same scheme: with one hand they dismantle public services, and with the other they squeeze the money of each and every Madrid resident to put it in their pockets,” says Manuela Berguerot, the leader of Más Madrid. in the regional assembly.
“Lasquetty was the guru of the privatization of public health and of those dusts, these waiting lists.
Today his reward is to collect 1,200 euros in expenses for each meeting he attends at a public company,” she adds.
"The Popular Party does not have a problem with the public, but rather a problem of hypocrisy: what bothers it is that the money ends up in health and education and not its shenanigans and contracts."
“We are going to supervise the work he does,” they warn the leadership of Juan Lobato's PSOE.
“We demand total transparency about his work and his participation in the company's activity,” they emphasize.
“Innova currently barely has any business and the bulk of the ordinary budget goes to the personnel chapter,” they complete in the PSOE of Las Rozas.
Javier Fernández Lasquetty, with Esperanza Aguirre and Ana Botella in a photograph taken during his time as Minister of Health (2010-2014). ULY MARTÍN
Lasquetty has reached this point after a political life full of milestones, controversies and reforms.
He was Minister of Immigration and Cooperation (2007-2010) and of Health (2010-2014) with Esperanza Aguirre, a position that he left due to the mobilizations of the
white tides
of health workers who were protesting his commitment to private management of the new hospitals. public.
He then dedicated himself to intellectual life at the Francisco Marroquín University, the temple of liberalism in Latin America, where he learned that the Constitutional Court endorsed the private management model for public hospitals that he had launched in Madrid and learned that Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa He included him in the acknowledgments of his book
Tiempos recios
.
That dedication summarizes the predicament that Fernández-Lasquetty enjoys in the liberal world.
Even more so since Díaz Ayuso brought him back into active politics in 2019, and commissioned him to cut as many taxes as he could.
“His mission is to carry out a policy of tax reduction and economic liberalization,” read his official profile as a counselor.
He acted accordingly: he reduced personal income tax with a reform valued at 300 million that especially favored high incomes, he deflated it with the same consequences to combat inflation;
eliminated the nominal own taxes that the region still maintained;
and he designed a personal income tax bonus to attract 30,000 assets from abroad with the guarantee that about 245 million would be saved.
Although this last tax reduction was not approved due to Vox's refusal to support it, it will now go ahead thanks to the absolute majority of the PP.
With his back seasoned by that biography, which includes having been general secretary of FAES and deputy director of the cabinet of former president José María Aznar, it is easy to imagine Fernández-Lasquetty listening to the criticism from the left towards his signing for Las Rozas Innova with a certain indifference.
A lover of baroque scores, and a regular at the National Auditorium, he has heard that music before, the former councilor says.
“The PSOE has been criticizing me for 15 years,” summarizes Fernández-Lasquetty, who claims to now work the same 12 hours a day that he worked before.
“If they continue to do so it must be because of their regrettable inability to do or say anything new.”
They say that Fernández-Lasquetty said goodbye to a group of deputies from other parties with a polite message in which, incidentally, he noted that with his signing for Morinvest, Alicia Koplowitz's SICAV, he did not incur a cause of incompatibility.
Nothing to do with his performance as Minister of Economy, Finance and Employment of the Government of the Community of Madrid, I was saying.
Not before, not now, not tomorrow.
-Does it leave the door open to a third return to politics?
-No.
I left politics by my own decision and I will not return to it.
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