Toni Cantó signs for a television in the orbit of Vox, and Ayuso is not in a hurry to relieve him

Thursday, 6:00 p.m.

Toni Cantó has an appointment with Jero García, a former boxer who goes to the offices of the Spanish Office to see if he has a place in the program

.

It is the last meeting in which the former deputy of Cs and UPyD acts as a gateway to the cultural programs of the Community of Madrid, and his juicy financing.

Two hours later, Queen Elizabeth II dies.

In the midst of the consequent information storm, Cantó announces his resignation with a message in which he omits that he will sign for 7NN television, close to Vox, according to the

and confirmed the channel to this newspaper.

Goodbye to his salary of more than 75,000 euros;

to a job with more promises than facts;

already 12 months surrounded by the controversy that he ran a beach bar made to measure for him after falling off the electoral lists of the PP for having registered late in the Community of Madrid.

He will have no substitute.

At least for now.

The work that Cantó did, apparently, does not need more relief than that the Minister of Culture, Tourism and Sports, Marta Rivera de la Cruz, assume her functions.

More information

Toni Cantó leaves the Ayuso Spanish Office for "a new professional project"

“The case of Toni Cantó is one more case of the obscene use of the money of the people of Madrid to pay political favors by the PP”, Mónica García, the leader of Más Madrid and leader of the opposition, lamented this Friday, referring to the fact that the conservative formation would have rewarded the role of the exlector as a symbol that the former UPyD and Cs voters had a place in the PP.

“It was an

like the one they already set up for Santiago Abascal [the foundation for patronage and social sponsorship, in times of Esperanza Aguirre]”, he continued.

"We have not known any performance from the Spanish Office, and the director's greatest merit has been to become a dispenser of hoaxes and lies against political opponents," he continued.

"No one will miss him," he stressed.

"After a few months parasitizing public accounts, and after a good vacation, like a good mug, he will continue to pour out his

about him from other irreconcilable places with a healthy democracy."

Cantó arrived at his position in June 2021. The first thing he had to do was defend his appointment: “I am the beach bar.

There is no other structure than me”, she said, wanting to dispel any doubt that this was serious work, and not realizing that he was only adding fuel to the fire.

His first mission was to organize the Festival de la Hispanidad in a couple of months, created around the national holiday of October 12.

It cost 880,513.67 euros, according to information accessed by this newspaper, and included paying 93,253 euros for organizing a press conference in which three actors read a selection of poetry, narrative, speeches and quotes from Spanish and Latin American writers;

hire a communication agency for 11,000;

or pay 5,000 euros for t-shirts.

In parallel, Cantó and the festival aroused protests from the Alcalá de Henares City Council, since the event's schedule overlapped with that of the Cervantes week, declared of national tourist interest.

But it didn't matter.

He sang, his festival, and the promotion of Madrid as a destination to study Spanish, turned the ex-actor into a kind of fashionable man.

Manuel Pacho, the musician who composed the anthem of the PP, met with him.

Also representatives of Catalan Civil Society (SCC).

Members of the syndicate of lyrical artists.

Ambassadors, consuls and cultural attaches from Chile, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador or the Dominican Republic.

Businessmen.

Employer directors.

And even a consultant who wanted to promote Spanish in Russia in the midst of the invasion of Ukraine.

They all picked up the phone for the same reason: they wanted a piece of the Spanish business pie.

The presidency of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, and Toni Cantó, during a rally for the 2021 regional election campaign. JESUS ​​BRIONES (GTRES)

Because that was the mission that Cantó had, as he described in his own handwriting: "Identify opportunities to create wealth and employment around the Spanish language and cooperate in the promotion of Hispanic culture and art," the exactor wrote in the declaration of activities and goods to which he was bound as a high position.

"Why?" Cantó asked himself during an appearance in May at the Assembly, when he reasoned about the advantages of having signed an agreement with the Spanish Federation of Associations of Spanish Schools in Madrid (FEDELE) to promote the presence of foreign students of Spanish in Madrid.

"Above all for an economic reason, because the Spanish students who come to our community are here for longer than the usual tourism and, in addition, they spend almost double their resources."

And business is business.

As a result of this agreement, the Community invited tourist agents from the United States, Lithuania, France, Poland, Morocco, India, Canada, Turkey, Jordan, Uzbekistan, Rwanda and the United Kingdom to Madrid in April.

They walked through the Prado Museum.

They ate and drank in characteristic places.

Everything, so that they would fill the region with students and improve a striking statistic: of the 140,000 Spanish students who arrived in Spain in 2019, only 18,000 did so in Madrid, according to data from the Community.

In parallel, Cantó's office opted to multiply the presence of the region in international educational forums by financing that of FEDELE.

Other projects soon joined this attempt to turn Spanish into money: a grammar contest in collaboration with the Navy and the English Court (the prize is a trip of several days on the Juan Sebastián Elcano training ship);

a seminar called

the organization of

either

that of

, a campaign to promote the contributions of American emigrants to Madrid society.

Various agreements have also been signed.

Everything, until Cantó's departure this Thursday, a year after his appointment, when he leaves an Office without its own website (beyond the administrative one);

no social media profiles to compete with the handful that make fun of the organ;

with just a couple of officials;

and with a workload that allowed Cantó to be a professor of the leadership course led by Albert Rivera, his former head of Cs, at the Cardenal Cisneros Institute.

It is an honor to be part of the great teaching staff that @Albert_Rivera has assembled for the postgraduate course in management and political leadership at Cardenal Cisneros University.

I will participate in the areas of public speaking and communication.

https://t.co/ccG2pl52zN

– Toni Cantó (@ Tonicanto1) September 9, 2021

“He has a professional offer that he considers to be very interesting, and there is nothing more than that”, the counselor Rivera de la Cruz assured this Friday, measuring every word even to distance himself from the assessment that Cantó has made about his professional future .

"He has done a great job," she continued.

“All the activity that is going to be done between now and January is closed, so there is no rush to fill that gap.

Projects transcend people, and in this case, it transcends the director that the Office had when it opened.”

"It is a personal decision of Toni Cantó that is respected," summarizes a government source that has Ayuso's confidence.

“The Spaniard's project continues regardless of whether he is Cantó or not”, he underlines.

"The office is not dismantled."

Cantó boasted about his relationship with the two politicians: "I see both of them often and I have the luck and privilege of being able to communicate with them whenever I ask, and they respond very quickly," he went on to say.

A plate of lentils had united the three for the first time in December 2020, at a meal that raised the alarms of Ignacio Aguado, then vice president of the coalition Executive formed by PP and Cs: something was happening behind his back.

That something ended up translating into the signing of Cantó by the Government of Ayuso, led in the spring of 2021 by Pablo Casado and Teodoro García-Egea, at that time the most powerful men in the PP.

His supporters defenestrated after losing the internal pulse with the regional baroness, Cantó leaves for 7NN.

On Monday, his tasks will be detailed.

He is sure, in any case,

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