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A decade of corruption with Esperanza Aguirre at the helm

2022-07-24T20:54:49.563Z


Several courts and half a dozen judges uncover the criminal plots in the Community of Madrid between 2003 and 2012. The prosecution does not see signs of "deliberate ignorance" in the actions of the president


A dozen judicial investigations over the last 15 years have uncovered multiple cases of serious corruption in the governments of the Community of Madrid presided over by Esperanza Aguirre between 2003 and 2012. This phenomenal pillage of public funds was perpetrated by different corrupt plots that They are already among the largest known in democracy: there are more than 100 involved between public officials and businessmen.

Many of the allegedly completed crimes that are still pending trial benefited Esperanza Aguirre, a candidate in two electoral campaigns for which the Madrid PP had more money than legally authorized, of allegedly illicit origin and hidden from the Court of Auditors.

But neither the PP of Madrid is accused of participating for profit in the crimes committed by its leaders and by different private companies, nor is Esperanza Aguirre prosecuted in any of the judicial cases of corruption.

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Esperanza Aguirre, the politician who “never” knew anything

The former president did not know anything, as she herself confesses, and the prosecutor does not find sufficient evidence to attribute to Esperanza Aguirre a "deliberate ignorance" that could incriminate her.

This principle of law serves to punish those who "do not want to know what they can and should know, and benefit from the situation."

The main collaborators of the former president are threatened with jail and have lived under suspicion for years.

The list of victims is getting longer and longer: his two vice presidents, some of his advisers, his press officer, the general secretary and the manager of the Madrid PP, whom Aguirre named and with whom he usually dispatched, are charged, or prosecuted .

This situation that exculpates Aguirre for corruption in institutions and bodies that she herself presided over generates considerable controversy.

“It is not enough that Aguirre presided over the three bodies where the crimes have occurred: Fundescam, the PP of Madrid and the Government of the Community.

No subordinate of hers pointed her out in her interrogations as being aware of this situation.

And with those wickers, you can not accuse, "explains an anti-corruption prosecutor familiar with the case.

One of the defendants in the summaries that affect the PP in Madrid replies: "It is surreal that all those who worked around her and for her benefit are accused of serious crimes for which they did not profit and she has been exonerated by the Prosecutor's Office Anti-corruption.

No one can believe that irregularities occurred in the three bodies that she presided over and that she never knew anything.”

The judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón will decide who sits on the bench in the case of the box b of the PP-Madrid with which the electoral campaigns of 2007 and 2011 were financed. This instructor has concluded other investigations that were still open by various corruption plots linked to leaders of the PP in Madrid.

Dozens of politicians and businessmen have been prosecuted.

In one case, for the payment of bribes to seven PP mayors —plus one from the PSOE and another from a local party— in exchange for awarding energy efficiency contracts to the Cofely company;

in another, for fixing contests in favor of Water Music, a firm specializing in the organization of popular festivals.

Vice presidents, advisers and general directors of the three governments of Esperanza Aguirre and a dozen mayors of the PP of the Community of Madrid are or have already been in prison, are being prosecuted pending trial or are charged with serious crimes of corruption in a dozen of causes: Gürtel (two stages already sentenced);

City of Justice, Canal de Isabel II, Golf Course, Navalcarnero Train,

Online Reputation,

Caja B of the PP-Madrid, municipal festivals or institutional advertising.

Esperanza Aguirre won the second Madrid regional elections held in October 2003 by an absolute majority. The first elections of that year, in May, were ruined by a fright.

The

tamayazo

- the betrayal of two socialist deputies that prevented a leftist government in the Community of Madrid - caused the electoral repetition and Aguirre's PP achieved the absolute majority that it had lost a few months before.

Since then and until she left the institutional position, multiple illegal and corrupt activities committed by her main collaborators took place around the Madrid president.

'Gürtel case'.

Alberto López Viejo, squire for acts of self-aggrandizement

Alberto López Viejo, former councilor of the Community of Madrid, upon entering the National High Court in 2015.Julian Rojas

Alberto López Viejo is sentenced to 27 years in prison for his illicit enrichment as a collaborator in the Gürtel plot, a corrupt business network that colonized several administrations governed by the PP where he received contracts in exchange for illegal commissions.

He was Esperanza Aguirre's right-hand man for propaganda acts.

"He designed a novel communication policy with a greater presence of the president, which entailed an increase or multiplication of her institutional acts," writes the Supreme Court.

López Viejo was Deputy Minister of the Presidency and Minister of Transport with Aguirre.

He even awarded acts of the president for 6.5 million euros to the business group of Francisco Correa, who obtained a profit of 2,

6 million for these contracts for the adjudication of which "the most elementary rules" were dispensed with.

López Viejo charged a bribe of 10% of what was invoiced in each contracted event.

Between 2004 and 2008 dozens of institutional acts of Esperanza Aguirre were carried out with this corrupt system.

The Supreme Court ruling establishes that the Gürtel network was enriched thanks to hundreds of finger contracts from the Government of the Community of Madrid and favored treatment in at least four large Madrid municipalities governed by the PP.

Ignacio González prosecuted for a golf course that the president devised

Esperanza Aguirre brought back the idea of ​​building a golf course in the center of Madrid from a trip to Japan: "I saw it in Tokyo and in the movies."

Taking advantage of some land on the Canal de Isabel II, the regional government got down to work despite the resistance of the Madrid City Council, which had not yet authorized the work.

Ignacio González was then president of Canal de Isabel II and "he devised a system so that the awards fell at some point to a company linked to his relatives, which allowed them to allegedly pocket more than half a million euros," according to Judge Manuel García Castellon.

González, Aguirre's right-hand man as regional vice president when the events occurred, is being prosecuted and the Prosecutor's Office is asking for four years in prison.

The millionaire waste of the City of Justice

Land of the City of Justice in the neighborhood of Valdebebas (Madrid).

kick for

The judge of the National High Court Santiago Pedraz has sent the case of the City of Justice of the Community of Madrid to trial, one of Esperanza Aguirre's star projects that got bogged down in the middle of the scandal.

Former regional vice president Alfredo Prada will sit on the bench as the head of that waste of public funds through rigged contracts for more than 40 million euros.

The Prosecutor's Office requests eight years in prison for the former vice president for the continued crimes of prevarication and embezzlement of public funds.

In a conversation between Aguirre and Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo in March 2014, many years before the investigation of

the Ciudad de la Justicia case began,

The former president of Madrid considered that her former vice president Alfredo Prada was a "choricete" and explained that for that reason she had kicked him out of her government.

The ruinous purchase of a Brazilian company after a bite of four million

Canal de Isabel II, the jewel in the crown of public companies in Madrid, was bought in 2012 by a small Brazilian company, Emissao, for 30 million dollars.

In that operation, the buyers were directors of Inassa, a Colombian subsidiary of Canal de Isabel II, and they secretly agreed with the seller to take almost four million euros in commissions.

The brains behind this operation, and the main director of Inassa, was Edmundo Rodríguez Sobrino, who was also a director of the newspaper

La Razón

.

When the scandal broke, the directors of the newspaper pressured the then president of the Community of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes, to stop investigating a case that fully affected one of her advisers.

It was useless.

Judge Manuel García Castellón has prosecuted the managers who participated in that purchase and Ignacio González, the former regional president who was supposedly going to collect part of the bribe agreed with the Brazilian seller, although González never withdrew the money that corresponded to him.

Excessive electoral expenses in 2007 and 2011 with money of illicit origin

After almost seven years of judicial investigation of the

Punica case,

The Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office has concluded that the PP of the Community of Madrid incurred electoral expenses much higher than those declared to the Court of Auditors, expenses that exceeded those allowed by law.

The candidate who benefited from this alleged "electoral doping" was Esperanza Aguirre, who won both elections with an absolute majority.

"The accounts presented to the supervisory body did not respond to the reality of what happened," writes the prosecutor.

In order to execute this plan, of which the president of the Madrid PP and the regional government supposedly knew nothing, "it was necessary to have related businessmen who, performing the service, later invoiced it under other concepts."

The prosecutor also details that the PP needed "sources of fundraising, very opaque,

either altering the declared destination and transferring those resources to the service providers, either in cash or through altered invoices”.

This mechanism was repeated in at least two regional elections.

But the prosecutor only blames the party's manager, Beltrán Gutiérrez, and the general secretary of the PP in Madrid in 2011, Francisco Granados.

Fundescam's cover to finance rallies

Fundescam is a foundation of the PP of Madrid that Esperanza Aguirre presided over.

It was financed with subsidies from the Community of Madrid and with donations from private entrepreneurs, many of them contractors of the regional administration itself.

Fundescam funds, according to the law, could only be used for the organization of seminars, courses, studies and similar things.

But Fundescam's money was repeatedly used for electoral acts, according to the judicial investigation.

"Diverting funds from a subsidy for a purpose other than the reason for its granting and covering up that fact with false billing is a crime of fraud and false documentation," according to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office.

Francisco Granados, general secretary of the PP in Madrid in the 2011 electoral campaign, reminded the judge of some anomalies that he noticed at the time.

"These companies were not contracted by the party and those companies, according to other summaries, had been contracted by the Community of Madrid, I understand that this was the way of remunerating them."

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor considers him guilty of those events and recounts the maneuvers of companies such as El Laboratorio de Almagro, Esperanza Aguirre's "main provider of services for the campaign", which billed 1.2 million euros but only collected 137,000 euros from the account PP election.

Propaganda of the president in social networks paid for with public funds

The company EICO, owned by Alejandro de Pedro, reached an agreement with the Government of the Community of Madrid to take care of Esperanza Aguirre's image on the internet.

And for this they created a series of accounts where the regional president was praised and criticism or negative news from other media were countered.

For this work, EICO collected public money from the Community of Madrid.

The anti-corruption prosecutor maintains that "it was decided to make direct awards to EICO, recording minor

online

work contracts for the Community of Madrid despite the fact that such work was never done, being the simple formal coverage to be able to pay the others without raising suspicions".

1% of the construction companies that the regional government distributed among companies that worked for the PP

The Government of Esperanza Aguirre imposed a clause in construction competitions (roads, hospitals, public housing...) by which the construction company that won the competition had to dedicate 1% of the budget to publicize the works.

That 1% was never managed by the construction companies but by the different departments of the Community of Madrid, which in many cases awarded that 1% to private companies as payment for the electoral work done for the PP.

But Aguirre, according to the anti-corruption prosecutor, did not know all these details: "From the result of the investigation, the participation of Esperanza Aguirre Gil de Biedma in the criminal acts exposed in this separate piece cannot be considered proven, since, beyond the prescription of the electoral crimes associated with the regional elections of 2007 and 2011, the truth is that there has been no evidence to confirm that she was aware of them.

Anticorruption recalls in its exculpatory account of the former Madrid president a conversation recorded during the investigation in which Aguirre tells Ignacio González that the Madrid PP exceeded electoral expenses but did not break the law with Fundescam expenses.

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Source: elparis

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