Surprise, what you call surprise, it really isn’t. That the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra in the middle of the pandemic was a case of moral corruption by the Government is a certainty. A forceps delivery that upset and embarrassed members of the Executive itself and officials who…
Between shock and desolation, from disbelief and perplexity to unease about what may be coming. Again. The PSOE trembles, from north to south and from east to west, after the indictment of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for alleged corruption crimes.
The first time a politician was convicted of influence peddling in Spain was 31 years ago. The historic socialist mayor of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Juan Ignacio Pujana, was sentenced to six years of disqualification, one month of arrest, and a fine. The Barcelona Court considered that he had facilitated an award for the construction and concession of several underground parking lots to a company that in turn had to subcontract the work to a construction company owned by a friend of his. The judges coined the term “chain influence peddling.” The mayor, using his position, pressured municipal technicians and officials. He did so, initially, out of friendship, since the sentence considered that he did not receive money in return, and he was acquitted of the charges of bribery and forgery. Evidently, Pujana disappeared from the public radar. Since then, it has been clear that the crime of influence peddling is one of the most difficult to discern, since it is necessary to prove pressure on an official or public officer and also to have the authority to carry out that coercion. Politicians who are already former, that is, who have left their positions in governments, often maintain a significant capacity for influence in those administrations, so they are often recruited by consultancies and companies to open the doors of the public sector for them. Is this the case of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero?
The car of Judge José Luis Calama on which the investigation, indictment, against José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is based includes a detailed account of the operation of a scheme that wanted to obtain a public loan to save a small airline using for this…
Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is said to have used his influence within the government of Pedro Sánchez and that of Venezuelan Nicolás Maduro to conduct business, according to the judge of the National Court José Luis Calama, who has charged him. The question is: whom did he influence? The court order does not specify which senior government official or administration employee was influenced but, however, hints at meetings, encounters, contacts, or references regarding the moves that the former socialist leader and his network would have made to achieve the bailout of the airline Plus Ultra.
The Government and the Generalitat took a new step this Wednesday in the architecture of Catalan self-government. After President Salvador Illa and the leader of ERC, Oriol Junqueras, sealed a key agreement yesterday to steer the Catalan budgets, the institutional machinery responded with unusual speed by holding a new meeting of the State-Generalitat bilateral commission to support the Generalitat’s deployment of powers, strengthen the shared management of infrastructures, and provide political and economic coverage to the pact between socialists and republicans.
The spokesperson of Esquerra Republicana (ERC) in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, has stated that he is “willing” to lead the space to the left of the Socialist Party and run as the lead candidate in the next general elections scheduled for July 2027.
The United States Department of Homeland Security collaborated with the Spanish police in the money laundering investigation that led to the case opened by the National Court against the former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, according to a department spokesperson, a fact that already appeared in the order of the National Court judge who charged him with allegedly leading a network of influence peddling and money laundering, which represents a new setback for the left-wing Government, already harassed by other corruption scandals.
The Council of Ministers agreed to the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra in March 2021 for an amount of 53 million euros, considering it a “strategic” company. That rescue may have been carried out outside the law. The judge of the National Court José Luis Calama believes that the airline did not meet the requirements established in the European regulations to be rescued.
The car of instructor José Luis Calama reconstructs through messages from those investigated in the Plus Ultra case how the airline company strove during the pandemic to access public funds (“we need to get the aid”) through political means (“we contacted Ábalos,” “the bridge with ZP has just been made”) in exchange for payments to whoever agreed to it (“We are going to screw even if we have to pay a little”). These conversations have been obtained by the National Court thanks to the international collaboration of the United States agency Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which extracted them from the phone of the also investigated Rodolfo Reyes, Venezuelan partner of the airline.