Corruption, blackmail and an espionage attempt in the self-destruction of the PP

The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and the former general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, in January 2022, in Madrid. Eduardo Parra (Europa Press)

The appointment to give applause to the president of Castilla y León, Alfonso Fernández Mañueco, is at the Ritz hotel in Madrid.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso attends the event ready to fake a reconciliation with Teodoro García Egea, general secretary of the PP, whom she has blocked on the phone.

The masks that cover part of their faces provide the two politicians with a photograph of peace without fear of being discovered in the lie.

They both know that their war is still alive and will leave victims;

both hide toxic information from the opposite for an explosive outcome.

It's Monday, January 10, 2022.

The president of the PP, Pablo Casado, has been fighting for power with Ayuso for months, whom he himself elevated.

The struggle is similar to others experienced in the last 20 years between the PP governments in the Community of Madrid and the national leadership.

The game for power between Puerta del Sol and Génova 13 is played now, as before, in the sewers of politics with blackmail, espionage attempts, betrayal, lies and corruption.

The PP thus returns to the quagmire of the internal battles that devour its reputation, according to several former leaders.

These are the main milestones of the six months of tensions that ended the career of Casado, the first leader in the history of the PP elected by the militants and dethroned by the leaders.

1. Tax data as a blackmail weapon.

At the end of August, the president of the PP receives information about Tomás Díaz Ayuso's business dealings with the Community of Madrid.

The tip is given by someone who is far from the Moncloa Palace and very close to the PP, according to people familiar with the origin of the information.

Confidence maintains that the president's brother declared 286,000 euros in model 347 (sales to third parties) for an intermediation with the Community of Madrid in 2020.

[The contract for the 250,000 masks for 1.5 million euros in favor of Priviet Sportive, a company owned by a friend of the Díaz Ayusos, was signed on April 1, 2020 at the Ministry of Health by emergency route —without competition public and with few controls.

Tomás Díaz Ayuso received at least 55,800 euros from Priviet for a few days of efforts to obtain the material.

On May 20, 2020, the Governing Council chaired by Ayuso was informed of this and other contracts].

Casado tells the president in September 2021 that he received information about his brother's suspicious business.

And Díaz Ayuso replies: “I am very surprised by what you are telling me.

This happened a year and a half ago.

I will ask my brother and find out."

The president assures that days later she wrote a message to Casado to clarify that his brother had a normal business relationship with the company that sold the masks and that there was nothing illegal.

The general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, demands more explanations in October 2021.

"He threatened to leak her brother's contract to various media if she did not resign from the presidency of the PP in Madrid," they say from Ayuso's team.

García Egea denies the alleged blackmail.

"She was asked that her brother could contract with the Community of Madrid, but without hiding her name behind a company," say popular sources.

The PP leadership handled legal reports on the case where possible crimes were pointed out (influence peddling, embezzlement) that, if confirmed, could end with the president's indictment.

"The operation is ethically and aesthetically unpresentable, but I doubt very much that it fits into the Penal Code," says a former leader of the PP expert in Criminal Law.

2. The other anonymous leak.

Last November, the parliamentary group of Más Madrid in the Regional Assembly and journalists from various media outlets received anonymous phone messages denouncing, without evidence, the alleged hit by the president's brother ("300,000 euros") on account of the mask contract

Ayuso's chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, strives to devalue the information.

The regional government's response to elDiario.es, the first outlet to denounce the award to a friend of the Díaz Ayuso family, is laconic: "The contract is audited and perfectly legal."

No word of the brother.

3. Municipal advisors air the contract.

Ángel Carromero is a PP leader who made a career in New Generations alongside Casado.

That was 15 years ago and now he works as a senior position in the Madrid City Council.

He dedicates part of his time to defending Casado's interests without the need for anyone to order him to.

Since the end of November, Carromero uses other positions of trust to encourage some media to investigate the contract with which the president's brother profited, according to people close to this high position.

Carromero does not have the documents that prove the business of Tomás Díaz Ayuso.

It is then when these municipal advisors take a qualitative leap in their efforts and seek help from detective agencies, according to what a witness to these movements tells EL PAÍS.

4. Two private detectives, an indiscretion.

Julio Gutiez owns the Mira detective agency.

Although anonymity is a guarantee of success in his sector, he is known in Madrid politics because for years he was charged in the open case for espionage against Ignacio González, former Madrid president, in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), in 2008. The detective did not He betrayed no one during the years in which he was charged and the case was filed in 2017 without it being known who commissioned the espionage to destroy González.

Four years later, Gutiez bursts onto the battlefield between the national leader of the PP and the president of Madrid.

Trusted positions of the Madrid City Council, directly or indirectly linked to Carromero, consulted two private detectives from two different firms last December about the possibility of obtaining tax information from Tomás Díaz Ayuso, according to what people familiar with these contacts explained to EL PAÍS .

The spies answer that it is an illegal job.

No one hires them and espionage does not occur.

Julio Gutiez is one of the two detectives and confirms the contact.

The fuse of the scandal that threatens to kill the leadership of the PP is lit.

5. Two former ministers: the informer and the intermediary.

Former Minister of Justice Rafael Catalá is a friend of Julio Gutiez.

The detective tells the former minister the query that he made him a supposed municipal charge to snoop into the accounts of Ayuso's brother.

Catalá transfers this confidence to the president in mid-December.

The information will be key in the sinking of Casado.

Former Minister Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who fled from politics a long time ago, receives a call from Díaz Ayuso before Christmas to tell him what he knows about Catalá and ask him to mediate with Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida.

Ruiz-Gallardón makes the request and informs Ayuso that the mayor of Madrid knows nothing about the espionage attempt, but has guaranteed that he will conduct an internal investigation.

6. An earthquake in the hands of Ayuso.

2022 is a decisive year for the aspirations of Pablo Casado, who expects a comfortable victory for the PP in the elections in Castilla y León with which to boost his career at La Moncloa.

The popular leader cannot imagine that hell is just around the corner for him.

The one who can sense it is Isabel Díaz Ayuso, because she has had scandalous information in her hands since mid-December.

Her chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, confirmed in the third week of January that a media outlet already had information about the espionage attempt on the president of the Community of Madrid.

The same information that they have managed since Catalá warned them a month before.

The same information that they transmit to Ruiz-Gallardón and that he transfers to the mayor of Madrid.

The same information that is published in

on February 17, 2022 and that triggers the fierce attack of Díaz Ayuso: "I could never imagine that the national leadership of my party would act in such a cruel and unfair way against me."

7. The joint statement that Ayuso rejected;

the end of married

Casado goes to the Cope chain on February 18 to respond to Díaz Ayuso: "The question is if when 700 people died a day, you can contract with your sister and receive 286,000 euros."

The phrase seems an unequivocal condemnation of the president of the Community of Madrid.

But just a few hours later, Casado takes a step back that few understand.

He summons Ayuso and offers him a compromise: the closure of the open file in exchange for the president acknowledging that there was no espionage.

The presidency does not accept the deal and Casado chooses to make public a statement on Saturday, February 19, in which he announces the closure of the file in a satisfactory manner and denies that the national leadership has tried to spy on the president.

While they distribute the statement that acquits Díaz Ayuso,

A veteran of the PP outside the two sides, but aware of the intrigues of recent months concludes: “Married has fallen because during his three and a half years in office he left many open wounds in the territories and now the barons have taken revenge.

The espionage attempt, if it existed, does not explain what happened;

It's just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Pablo Casado and Teodoro García Egea believed that they had a power that they did not have.

Extortions in internal battles for power

The presidency of the PP in Madrid at stake.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso wants to be president of the PP in Madrid.

And she has denounced that the general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, threatened to leak information about her brother's business if she did not resign from the party's presidency in Madrid.

Ayuso did not accept the blackmail and the information came out about the public money that her brother earned at the cost of selling masks to the Community of Madrid.

The pressures against the candidacy of Cobo and Gallardón;

withdrawal of a magazine.

Esperanza Aguirre claimed in the autumn of 2005 the presidency of the PP in Madrid since she was already president of the Community, which she had reached after the electoral repetition caused by the two socialist turncoats who prevented the investiture of Rafael Simancas.

Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, who was then mayor of Madrid, supported his deputy mayor, Manuel Cobo, as a candidate to challenge Aguirre for the position.

From that moment on, the pressure against Ruiz-Gallardón intensified from the national leadership of the PP, through anonymous messages and even with information prepared against Cobo.

magazine

, which fed in part on the publicity of the Community of Madrid, prepared an issue where he told alleged secrets of Cobo to discredit him.

When Cobo decided to retire, someone ordered to change the cover and some of the content of the magazine before he hit the newsstands.

Some copies have been preserved.

Illegal monitoring with public money to end the adversary

Public money to spy on adversaries of Esperanza Aguirre.

In 2008, former civil guards hired by the Government of Esperanza Aguirre in the Ministry of the Interior of Madrid followed up two politicians, Manuel Cobo and Alfredo Prada, who supported Mariano Rajoy.

Two of those former civil guards confessed to being followed, collected in different parts and confirmed by expert reports from the National Police.

In addition, they attributed the order to carry out these illegal works to political leaders, but they were acquitted of the crime of embezzlement of public funds by a popular jury.

An accusatory video recorded in Cartagena de Indias.

A detective agency followed Ignacio González to Cartagena de Indias in 2008, on a trip that the then vice president of the Community of Madrid made in his capacity as president of Canal de Isabel II.

The photos of that espionage, advanced by EL PAÍS, did not count anything.

The follow-up video included subtitles that supposedly corresponded to the conversations that González had with his companions.

Those subtitles were invented to incriminate the former president in a crime, as he himself has denounced in the case where he is charged.

Police spies in the Ministry of the Interior.

Half a dozen commissioners are prosecuted for spying on the family of the former PP treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, with the aim of stealing documentation that could incriminate the Government of Mariano Rajoy.