A former deputy director and the current coordinator of Studies at the Juan de Mariana Institute, the ultraliberal think tank that honored the Argentine president, Javier Milei, last June in Madrid, are actively campaigning in favor of foreign vulture funds that are suing Spain for the cuts. to the renewables of the Mariano Rajoy government.
The latest example is that of Iruñe Ariño, deputy director of the IJM from November 2018 until August 2021 when she signed on as an advisor to the then Minister of Economy and Finance of the Community of Madrid, Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, the economic guru of Isabel Díaz Ayuso. until he left politics just over a year ago.
After ceasing as Lasquetty’s advisor in January 2023, Ariño founded a public affairs consultancy last year, Agenda Actual, which was in charge of organizing the famous dinner with Milei that brought together businessmen and politicians from the PP and Vox at the Casino from Madrid.
Agenda Actual has also been hired by funds that litigate against Spain. Last week Ariño sent a press release to the media in which he announced that “the British justice system rejects Spain’s appeal in one of the renewable energy awards valued at 101 million”, the so-called Antin case.
This is one of the sentences issued by the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), dependent on the World Bank. The debt associated with this litigation was purchased in 2017 by the American opportunistic fund Centerbridge from the French fund Antin.
Ariño, with whom elDiario.es contacted without receiving a response, sent another statement to the media in August in which she assured: “237 million of public debt, on the verge of technical default due to the Rajoy Government’s cuts in renewables”, becoming echo the demands of a group of those “affected” by the cuts led by another American firm, Blasket Renewable Investments.
The note about that decision of the British justice was echoed ipso facto on Thursday Libertad Digital, the medium of Federico Jiménez Losantos from which the majority of members of the current IJM management come, starting with its current director, Manuel Llamas, former deputy minister of Economy with Lasquetty. The news in Libre Mercado was signed by the journalist and economic analyst Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, current “Studies Coordinator” of Juan de Mariana.
Author of the book Madrid-style liberalismin his articles on that Losantos portal, Sánchez de la Cruz has paid special attention to the arbitrations, with news about how the PP “corners” the Government for some sentences derived from those cuts by Rajoy; or how this “scandal” and legal uncertainty “sink” foreign investment in Spain.
On the Juan de Mariana website, Sánchez de la Cruz has described this process as “a trail of incomprehensible breaches that have been perpetrated by the government of our country and have hit dozens of foreign companies.” “The person who signs these lines considered the compensation offered to the sector to be absolutely exaggerated, but that waste was as wrong as the decision to retrospectively withdraw the aid was aberrant.”
He has also linked “non-payments to the renewable sector” with the rise in energy prices that followed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In that article he charged against the “slowdown on the development of the nuclear sector” and the veto on fracking.
Three weeks before presenting the Juan de Mariana award to Milei, Sánchez de la Cruz accompanied representatives of foreign funds that are suing for cuts to renewable energy to demand at an event in a hotel in Madrid an agreement with the current Executive that settles the million-dollar compensation they claim.
There, a website was presented that exposes the numbers of the Spanish debt in these procedures: 1,500 million “unpaid awards”, 50 international investors affected and 73 million spent on consultants and lawyers for what they describe as “Spain’s fiasco with the renewables”.
It is worth remembering that three decades ago, in 2009, the Canarian lobbyist and businessman César Calzada, founder and still today president of the IJM, known for denying climate change and now in the private education business, published a report questioning the effectiveness of premiums for clean energy in the United States. That report, with Barack Obama focusing on the then leading Spanish renewable energy industry, had a certain international echo.
In 2013, Rajoy’s government, with José Manuel Soria as Minister of Industry, drastically cut this aid and gave rise to that cataract of demands that continues to this day. It so happens that in 2017 another think tank chaired by Calzada and currently inactive, the Atlantic Institute of Economic and Social Studies, He took the canary Soria out of his ostracism with an event in Gran Canaria after the scandal of his resignation after appearing in the Panama Papers.
Now people linked to the IJM work alongside the funds that are suing Spain for those Soria cuts.
Sources from the Ministry for the Ecological Transition emphasize that the vast majority of the awards are in the hands of speculative “vulture funds” that have acquired the rights from the original plaintiffs. And that Spain has managed to reduce the amount demanded by 85%. “On claims of 10,635 million, the compensation recognized amounts to 1,476 million.” There are another 1,447 million pending resolution.
From the department still headed by Teresa Ribera, they add that in these procedures “Spain and the European Commission are fully aligned.” They recall that in April the EU as a whole decided to abandon the Energy Charter Treaty, the investment protection agreement that covers these arbitration complaints, considering that its application would prevent the EU’s environmental objectives from being met and would hinder the climate action by governments with million-dollar demands to protect the interests of the fossil fuel industry.
Regarding this alleged non-payment of public debt reported by Irune Ariño, the ministry indicates that “the Kingdom of Spain is not aware of any possible judicial notification and no investor has been concerned about this issue; In reality, these are foreign currency programs whose conditions included a default on public debt that cannot be assimilated to arbitrations.”
With the CEOE
In the case of Sánchez de la Cruz, the economist is CEO of a think tank, Intelligent Regulation Forum, with which elDiario.es contacted without receiving a response. He has worked assiduously with the Institute of Economic Studies (IEE) of the CEOE. For example, it has been in charge of adapting into Spanish for the Spanish employers’ think tank the Economic Freedom indices prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a lobby that promotes the re-election of Donald Trump and is considered the most influential center of ultra-conservative thought in the United States.
For her part, Irune Ariño has a degree in Political and Administration Sciences from the Pompeu Fabra University and has collaborated in various media. Her signing as an advisor to Lasquetty public Sánchez de la Cruz at the Losantos portal. There he had a salary of 62,705.5 euros per year. His firm defines itself as “a public affairs consultancy and communications agency that goes outside the box.” Among the few clients that appear on its website are the economist Juan Rallo (former director of the IJM), Juan de Mariana or the International Foundation for Freedom, by Mario Vargas Llosa, in which Lasquetty is a director.
Co-author and coordinator of the trial Dismantling hegemonic feminismIn the 2016 general elections, Ariño was a candidate for Castellón for the Libertarian Party, which obtained 3,103 votes in those elections. She was director of the Student For Liberty (SFL) of Spain and Portugal. He has taught at private universities such as Francisco Marroquín, another of the few clients of his consulting firm, with a campus in Madrid (although it is not accredited as a university) and of which the founder of Juan de Mariana, with Lasquetty, was rector in Guatemala. as vice chancellor.
The Canary Islander Calzada, a disciple like Milei of the billionaire professor and magnate Jesús Huerta de Soto, has now picked up the ideologue of the health privatizations of Esperanza Aguirre for a recently launched online (and private) university of which the IJM is a shareholder, an entity that supposedly It is not for profit.
Last summer, the subsidized tourism companies of the Calzada family in the Canary Islands returned to doing business with the summer courses of the institute and that new university, taking advantage of the pull of Milei’s visit to Madrid. A technology entrepreneur, Fernando Monera, whose consulting firm has received millions of euros in public contracts and subsidies, was in charge of promoting that event with the Argentine president.
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