“It’s all a bit tiring now.” This is what Carlos Mazón said, last December 4to the tedious obligation of making known the details of his actions on October 29, the day of the catastrophic DANA that left 223 dead and three missing and in which the head of the Consell disappeared for several key hours at a controversial meal in the El Ventorro restaurant, the city’s mythical epicenter of conspiratorial dinners with politicians, businessmen and journalists sitting discreetly at their reserved tables.
The nature of the meal with the communicator Maribel Vilaplana already has more official versions than dishes the establishment offers: first it was a private lunch, then a work lunch and, later, a kind of hybrid meeting. Even it was said that it was “a snack around the Palau.”
The latest official version allows Mazón to hide, for the moment, the invoice: it was a meal as president of the Popular Party of the Valencian Community and, therefore, the receipt is only delivered to the Court of Accounts or, where appropriate, to the different investigative commissions on DANA.
In his long political career, lunches and dinners allow us to trace Carlos Mazón’s career in the PP, since he was appointed general director of the Valencian Youth Institute by Eduardo Zaplana in 1999, having just finished his law studies at the University of Alicante, until his questioned management of the DANA day, already as ‘molt honorable’ president and main tenant of the Palau de la Generalitat.
In The Duke, with businessmen from the ‘Brugal case’
The first meeting that destabilized his political resume was carried out by Mazón on April 18, 2008, this time in The Duke cafeteria, located in the Plaza de los Luceros, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of the Alicante Provincial Council, an institution of the who was then fourth vice president and deputy for Infrastructure. Mazón’s appointment with businessmen Rafael Gregory and Ignacio Mangada was discreetly monitored by agents from the Economic Crime Group of the Alicante Judicial Police, within the framework of the investigations into the ‘Brugal case’, a macro-case of corruption.
The investigators were following the trail of Rafael Gregory, who boasted in telephone conversations with other businessmen, tapped by the Police, of an “alleged network of alleged irregularities carried out by senior officials of the Provincial Council of Alicante in relation to contracting of public works”, according to a police report that directly alluded to Carlos Mazón and that appears in the summary.
Mazón was summoned to testify on February 24, 2011 before the head of the Investigative Court number 4 of Alicante, as a defendant for the alleged crimes of bribery and influence peddling. At that time he was already managing director of the Alicante Chamber of Commerce, a relevant position in the city’s business network. All those involved denied the facts and the case of the ‘Brugal case’ was finally filed. The police references to Mazón were recently evoked in the Supreme Court ruling of July 22 that validated the wiretapping of the ‘Brugal case’.
The El Corte Inglés cafeteria, with Fran Hervías
More than a decade after that delicate date at The Duke, Mazón had another meeting in the El Corte Inglés cafeteria in Alicante that would turn his political career upside down. In the first days of January 2019, with general, regional and municipal elections in sight, Ciudadanos was in full swing, with options to give the PP a surprise. Nurtured by popular representatives of Zaplanism in its great Alicante bastion, the then Secretary of Organization of the orange formation, Fran Hervías, proposed that Mazón lead the municipal candidacy of Ciudadanos to try to win the Provincial Council of Alicante.
Mazón seriously considered the proposal and imposed as a condition the control of a list that would include the current Minister of Education, José Antonio Rovira. Aware of the move, the then general secretary of the PP, Teodoro García Egea, attended a sort of monthly gastronomic meeting that Mazón held with a series of business friends and journalists to take a look at the pre-election atmosphere in Alicante.
After that meeting, in which the Ciudadanos proposal was not directly discussed, the PP of Pablo Casado and Teodoro García Egea maneuvered so that Mazón headed the list in Alicante to replace César Sánchez, then mayor of Calp and president of the Provincial Council. . Carlos Mazón thus ended up replacing Sánchez at the head of the provincial institution, in which he governed with Julia Parra, from Ciudadanos, as vice president.
‘Delicatessen’, at the table with businessmen and journalists
The gastronomic meeting that Teodoro García Egea attended was a monthly event at the Ripmar restaurant in Mutxamel (Alicante) in Mazón with a group of friends, which included several journalists, businessmen and his current regional secretary of Institutional Relations and Transparency, Santiago Lumbreras. . Halfway between a gathering and a dinner with old friends, Carlos Mazón used to meet businessman Miguel Quintanilla, owner of the Idex group. Journalist Jorge Fauró, current content coordinator for Prensa Ibérica, reported on the meetings, called ‘Delicatessen’, on his social networks.
The group celebrated the landing of Carlos Mazón as president of the Alicante Provincial Council in 2019, according to the journalist’s Instagram posts. As president of the provincial institution, Mazón awarded the company of one of the ‘Delicatessen’ diners, businessman Miguel Quintanilla, a contract of 1.1 million euros for the advertising insertion service.
Part of the group of friends, of varied ideologies and some linked to the PSPV-PSOE, also celebrated the next milestone in Carlos Mazón’s political career. Fauró posted another photograph on his social networks on Saturday, July 15, 2023, two days after Mazón was sworn in as president of the Generalitat. In the image, in addition to Toni Cabot, current director of the newspaper Information of Alicante, and the high official Santiago Lumbreras, the new head of the Consell appears very smiling next to the businessman Miguel Quintanilla.
However, Mazón lost his usual smile in photographs and videos on Instagram after the catastrophic DANA on October 29 and his controversial agape at the El Ventorro restaurant. Its Executive, in the midst of the reconstruction phase, chose to hire an advertising campaign to sell its ‘Pla Recuperem València’ measures. And the minor contract for the creativity of the campaign image was awarded, by hand, to businessman Miguel Quintanilla, one of the regulars at the ‘Delicatessen’ dinners.
After the publication of this information in this newspaper, Joan Baldoví, spokesperson for Compromís, reminded the president of the Valencian Courts in the last control session that Quintanilla’s company “has organized electoral events for the Popular Party” in Alicante. For his part, the socialist trustee, José Muñoz, who displayed a photograph of the ‘Delicatessen’ meetings at the parliamentary headquarters, snapped at Mazón: “Maybe he is the president that his new bosom friends need,” in a reference not at all evening to the ‘Gürtel case’ and the famous expression that Francisco Camps used to refer to Álvaro Pérez ‘El Bigotes’, representative of the plot in Valencia at the head of the Orange Market communication company.
El Ventorro, the most compromising food
Jorge Fauró made his Instagram account private after the ‘Delicatessen’ dinners snuck into the parliamentary debate. In one column published later He denied that the refreshments of the veteran group of friends were a “lobby of strange interests.” Previously, Fauró had branded Mazón’s controversial food on DANA day was “unfortunate and unacceptable.”
The meeting on October 29 with journalist Maribel Vilaplana, one of the best-known faces of Channel 9, the former regional television that went down in history for information manipulation, was not the first. Mazón and Vilaplana, as elDiario.es has learned, had dinner last Friday, October 11 at the La Raspa tavern, located on Cirilo Amorós street in València. The Presidency of the Generalitat assured that Mazón offered Vilaplana the direction of À Punt, the regional television, in El Ventorro, a proposal that would have been rejected by the journalist.
After the latest official version about the food, the vice president of The SpanishCruz Sánchez de Lara, stated in the program Espejo Público de Antena 3 that, according to their sources, the bill would have amounted to about “160 or so euros”, an account that included two set menus of 75 euros per head.
On the day of DANA, while Mazón was extending his meal in El Ventorro, the Generalitat Valenciana had already activated the Military Emergency Unit (UME) in Utiel, a town devastated by the first phase of the flood. During the meal, according to sources close to the journalist, DANA was not discussed nor did Mazón express any concern about the storm.
Some aspects of the chronology of the day in question remain to be clarified. Among others, the blank half hour in which it is still not known what Mazón was doing, between the end of the meal, around 6:00 p.m., and the strange call to the mayor of Cullera, Jordi Mayor, at 6:30 p.m.
Despite the gaps, the October 29 meal haunts the head of the Consell. It has even become one of the most repeated slogans in the three massive demonstrations that demanded Mazón’s resignation: “Mentre dinava, el poble s’ofegava” (while he was eating, the people were drowning).
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