The PSOE and PP have intensified their political battle this Friday over business dealings that concern the family circle of their leaders, Pedro Sánchez and Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. Early in the morning, the socialists announced that they will take parliamentary and judicial action to investigate the Xunta’s contracts with a company in which Feijóo’s younger sister is a director and the commissions allegedly paid by Quirón Salud to Alberto González Amador, Díaz Ayuso’s partner, and the home where the popular leader resides. “If they do not give explanations before next September, the socialists will initiate a series of parliamentary and judicial measures to clarify everything surrounding these two cases,” the PSOE warned in a statement. The threat has been labelled a “cover-up” by the PP’s deputy secretary of Organisation, Carmen Fúnez, who has accused the socialists of trying to divert the focus. “When someone is cornered by corruption like Mr. Sánchez, he invents false covers like the one we are seeing today to try to hide his business and his family’s business,” said the number three of the PP, in reference to the case opened against Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez.
Micaela Núñez Feijóo, younger sister of the former president of the Xunta and current leader of the national PP, has been a director at the Eulen services company for years. The amounts awarded to the entity since May 2009, when Feijóo was appointed regional president, amounted to an annual average of 2.86 million, According to the newspaper Public. The same newspaper published last sunday that the Galician Government of his successor, Alfonso Rueda, has in turn awarded more than 17 million in two years to Eulen. The PSOE has assured through a statement that it will investigate “to the last consequences” both these contracts awarded by the Xunta de Galicia and the payments from Quirón Salud to Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, as well as “the entire framework that surrounds these commissions and the home in which the president of the Community of Madrid resides.” And it emphasizes that it will not allow “the absolute majorities of the PP in Madrid and Galicia to turn their leaders into absolutists.” The socialists also point to Díaz Ayuso as “one of the biggest beneficiaries of the wild privatization of Madrid’s public health system” due to the business agreements with Quirón Salud with the alleged mediation of her partner.
This is not the first time that the PSOE has brought up the issue of Eulen and Feijóo’s sister. The first vice-president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, explicitly attacked the leader of the PP for the first time in April, during a control session in the Senate in a debate marked by attacks by the Popular Party senators on Sánchez and his wife. “Did Mr. Feijóo know that while he was president, the company of which his sister was a director contracted 37 million euros from the Xunta de Galicia? Was he involved?” Montero asked from the podium. Following the latest information published, the socialists have taken a further step this Friday and are threatening legal action if the PP does not clarify contracts that they consider spurious.
In the statement distributed to the media, the PSOE denounces that Feijóo’s sister has been the beneficiary, as director for Galicia of the company Eulen, of contracts with the Xunta amounting to a total of 21 million euros. Of this amount, four million were awarded, according to the socialists, by Feijóo’s cousin from “her responsibilities in the Galician public health system”, and another 17 million have come from the hand of the current head of the Galician Executive, Alfonso Rueda. “The Popular Party, with its absolute majority in the Galician parliament, refuses any kind of appearance or investigation into these millions of euros that circulate from the Galician administration to the company run by Feijóo’s sister,” says the statement, which adds: “This situation is unsustainable.”
The PP sees this new move as a strategy by the PSOE to shake off the accusations of “corruption” that concern Sánchez and his wife. “What is missing here are explanations and answers to the situation of corruption that is harassing the President of the Government,” said Carmen Fúnez after the PSOE statement was published. “I understand that in the face of so much corruption surrounding Mr. Sánchez, they are trying to invent false covers that will come to nothing. What will come to nothing are the explanations that Sánchez will have to give before the Cortes Generales and before all Spaniards,” added the PP Vice Secretary of Organization in front of the party headquarters in Madrid on the case opened by Judge Juan Carlos Peinado against the president’s wife and also in reference to other processes, such as that of the Koldo case. National Court judge Ismael Moreno is investigating the awarding of a series of contracts for face masks in the midst of the pandemic that affect the former advisor to former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos in a procedure in which two senior officials of the Ministry of Transport have been charged.
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Fúnez has also given the Prime Minister until September to respond to questions relating to these and other cases that, according to the PP, compromise the head of the Executive and the Socialists. The deputy secretary has not confirmed, however, whether the Popular Party will call Sánchez to appear in the same month of September in the commission of inquiry into the purchase of medical supplies during the pandemic and promoted by her party in the Senate, although he is already listed as summoned. Sources from the leadership privately acknowledge that it is not “pleasant” to seat the figure of the president in an investigative commission and that they will try to exhaust all avenues for Sánchez to respond in parliament or before the press. PSOE and PP thus accuse each other of not giving explanations and of increasing suspicions of corruption with their silence. And they are calling for next month to intensify their offensives.
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