It looks like the Partido Popular has – inadvertently – handed a reprieve to the PSOE and their current troubles following the discovery of (yet again) a nest of bad eggs in their own barn.
Recently, we were talking of the abrupt fall of the Socialists’ party organiser Santos Cerdán, after he was found to be taking bribes from some Ibex-35 companies. He’s now in prison awaiting events.
We always knew that the other lot was full of crooks – several still in jail and many others due to attend court in the months to come. Why, the last PP government of Mariano Rajoy fell thanks precisely to corruption.
Conservatives (if you will forgive the generalisation) are known to be more interested in money than they are in helping the underprivileged. We barely raise an eyebrow when one of their politicians is caught with his hand in the till. It’s all part of the game. There’s a difference though, when one of the progressives, the defenders of the workers, a syndicalist, a man of the people (and so on…) pulls a fast one on both his party and his country.
See, that’s not good.
Going back to the Felipe Gonzalez years, the PSOE have had a few ministers in jail (José Barrionuevo and Rafael Vera), or – do you remember the party member from Zaragoza who was promoted to be head of the Guardia Civil, Luis Roldán, and who ended up with a fortune in Switzerland and was forced to make a run for it in 1994, eventually being caught in Bangkok to eventually be jailed for 31 years? Not good. Later, the Andalusian wing of the party was found to be immersed in irregularities – two presidents of the Junta de Andalucía (Chaves and Griñán) plus a handful of others being found guilty in the ERE scandal.
But what of the Partido Popular? Aznar’s government at one time had a few bad eggs for sure: three of his ministers went to jail (Rodrigo Rato, Jaume Matas and Eduardo Zaplana), a couple of others managed to obtain pardons and now, after a secret judicial inquiry lasting several years (sometimes, these things are more secret than others), another minister from those and later times, Cristóbal Montoro, the long-time Minister for Hacienda, has been rumbled.
Montoro, who just a couple of weeks ago was seated up on the podium at the PP’s national congress, was a powerful party apparatchik who was not necessarily liked by his co-religionists: “He did a lot of damage, and now he’s going to do a lot more damage,” a PP council member says mournfully.
Montoro, the finance minister under both Aznar and Mariano Rajoy, now stands accused of the crimes of “bribery, fraud against the Public Administration, malfeasance, influence peddling, prohibited negotiations, business corruption and document falsification” for allegedly favouring, while he was Minister of Finance in Mariano Rajoy's government, gas companies that were clients of the law firm he founded in 2006’.
Along with some other stuff, like re-writing the worst excesses of the PP’s ‘black account’ before it reached the courts in 2020.
The Guardian says: ‘…It is alleged that Montoro established the “economic team”, a lawyer’s office linked to the finance ministry, which took kickbacks from gas and other energy companies in return for favourable government policy. It is further told that between 2008 and 2015 Montoro and 27 others accused, among them senior treasury officials, were paid at least eleven million euros by big energy companies. According to the police investigation led by the judge Rubén Rus, “the economic team received large commissions in return for its capacity to influence legislative and executive powers”’.
Montoro was evidently a big fish in the PP. He has now resigned from the party while maintaining his innocence. Over the weekend, two senior figures in Hacienda, both involved in the Montoro affair, were also dismissed.
In passing – well done the judiciary for keeping this inquiry silent for a full seven years!
The advantage for the PP was already beginning to slip from their fingers, the accusations from the eccentric Judge Peinado against the wife of Pedro Sánchez notwithstanding.
In the months to come, no less than thirty PP scandals will be brought to trial.
‘Public procurement rigging, bribe-taking, illegal urban development plans, influence peddling, irregular financing, even failure to provide assistance and negligent homicides; also the use of reserved funds for paramilitary operations…’ Plus the issues with Isabel Ayuso’s boyfriend (the Court is asking for three years and nine months) and the ongoing inquiry into Carlos Mazón in Valencia regarding his inactivity during the flood last autumn.
With the perhaps unfortunate timing of the release of the Montoro scandal, the aggression from Alberto Núñez Feijóo has been abruptly toned down: ‘Whatever needs to be investigated, let it be investigated’, he tweets.
And lastly, another headache for Feijóo – with a fact-checker reporting ‘Several senior officials from the Feijóo era in Galicia have been charged with corruption despite what the Popular Party leader claims’.
Which brings us to Vox. See, neither the PSOE nor the PP can claim that – unlike Vox – they’ve never had a crooked minister mortally embarrassed by the media filming him (or her) as he is admitted into the Soto de Real prison. Vox is the party that can claim the laurel (apart from the small issues of race, foreigners and so on, plus the current fraud-case against their erstwhile leader in Andalucía Francisco Serrano. The court is asking for eight years).
So, does the fall of Montoro trump the Cerdán scandal?
Better still, should we all be taking an enjoyable summer’s reprieve from politics?
If Pedro Sánchez can hold his government together: that’s the question, and will someone else . one of ours or one of theirs – be abruptly found to have been on the take?
It’s a dirty business, politics, but someone has to do it.