The footprint of corruption is indelible in the Madrid town of Arganda del Rey. The cranes, trucks and excavators are perfectly visible from the highway and precisely mark the point at which the gürtel plot took the consistory to the assault and conditioned the future of the city for decades. Buildings still built the EU-124 plot, the biggest ball of the long career of the gürtel plot perpetrated in 2006 and that these days is judged at the National Court with businessmen and politicians recognizing that, in those years, they sent more than the City Council itself. “In Arganda was Vox Populi,” says the current mayor, of the PP, Alberto Escribano, who was then five years old.
They were the happy years of the Gürtel plot in the Community of Madrid at the beginning of the new century. Francisco Correa and his people crossed the region jumping from the City Council in the City Council and where the Popular Party ruled established a branch in which to rise contracts and pay and charge commissions or make gifts to whoever needed. This procedure was repeated, according to the courts, in Madrid, Majadahonda, Pozuelo and Boadilla, but also in Arganda del Rey. It is a municipality with Pueblo airs of almost 60,000 inhabitants and that at the end of the 90s of the last century had a plot that promised a millionaire business only within the reach of those who could twist at will the criteria of the City Council.
The Gürtel case broke out more than 15 years ago and, today, with many firm convictions and few branches to sentence, the leaders have given themselves to the strategy of recognizing the facts and avoiding spending the rest of their days in jail. Francisco Correa has several judgments confessing the corruption that he deployed throughout the region of the PP and in these weeks the turn of the public office that helped him has reached.
Especially clear was in his confession Benjamín Martín Vasco, former deputy of the party in the Assembly and at that time high position of the department that managed the cake of the urbanizable land: the Development Society of Arganda del Rey. The objective was to “reduce opposition and intervention control to the maximum” and, in practice, create a “parallel town hall” to do and undo without problems. On the other side of the quadrilateral, the builder and former president of Real Madrid, Fernando Martín (Martinsa), has also confessed that this operation was sealed with a commission of 25 million euros for Francisco Correa.
Following the usual script, Martín Vasco and Mayor Ginés López took hundreds of thousands of euros. In a municipality where everyone gets face, two decades have passed so that the then ruler of the PP is clear. “I apologize and show my regret for how many damages could have caused in the exercise of my responsibilities in the City of Arganda del Rey,” he says Your letter of confession to find a more benevolent conviction.
Houses and commissions in Arganda
The history of the EU-124 plot of Arganda del Rey is the story of how corruption makes its way thanks to trust. The PP came to power in the town in 2003 after almost two decades of progressive domain with a United Left in local power. By the time the electoral victory of the PP candidate, Ginés López, a year and a half ago, the businessman Fernando Martín had taken his eye to the so -called “Execution Unit 124”. Martín saw a clear business behind that cryptic name.
Francisco Correa had been entering and leaving Genoa for years as one more, organizing the acts and campaigns of the party at the time of Aznar. The headquarters of the Madrid PP is on the first floor of the Conservative Headquarters and the party in Madrid had no secrets for the businessman. When the PP won in Arganda, in 2003, Fernando Martín received a message from Francisco Correa: “If it was not paid, it was not left.” Those are the words that Martín used last Tuesday at Gürtel’s trial for the piece of Arganda.
At the end of 2003 or early 2004 Correa and Martín gathered at the Fénix Gran Meliá Hotel in Madrid and agreed that the first would use their “political contacts” for Martinsa to build in Arganda. The commission remained to be determined. There were finally 25 million euros that were negotiated floor to floor, as described by Correa himself before the court. A pinch for each house.
This first meeting was followed by others until they reached the 25 million pact in commissions, 12 million after the adjudication of the plots and the rest as the execution progressed. Fernando Martín never knew who was going to take the commission, but imagined that they would be Correa and those responsible for the City Council related to public land. Martín, close to accessing Real Madrid to access to his brief presidency, never dealt with the latter.
“Once the operation was closed, I felt the obligation to share part of my benefit with Ginés and Benjamin,” Francisco Correa writes in the letter sent to the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Mayor Ginés López took 523,427 euros and Benjamín Martín Vasco, responsible for the land and former regional deputy, obtained 363,295.63 euros of commission.
The adjudication occurred on December 21, 2004 and that same day the first payment was made. All those involved had accounts abroad and societies in tax havens. The transfer of funds was immediate. The second payment took place two years later. By then, Martinsa had already expanded the number of homes, previously agreed in secret with the politicians of Arganda.
“An exciting path” with PP, PSOE and IU
The ball ranking of the Gürtel plot is not easily accessible and that of the EU-124 arganda Then, in the first months of the following year, they obtained the approval of the Community of Madrid de Esperanza Aguirre and its Division of Urban Planning.
The Argandeña population knows well, therefore, what it is to live with corruption with total naturalness and that Gürtel’s greatest loot is approved without raising suspicions. It was Lola Martín, spokesman of the PP in the town, which In 2016 he corrected Aguirre When the former president said that her corrupt collaborators were reduced to two positions that had “left frog.” “He was wrong, it is shown that there are more than two frogs,” Martín said from the zero zone of the plot object of desire. Time has proved the reason to a councilor who talked about his own party.
The current image of the plot, two decades after the ball and commissions, is how corruption fills its own pockets at the expense of the public and common. Most of the houses are guessing the target that replaces the brick throughout the country, but they are mostly doing. Behind is the history of several cooperatives, some failed and promoted by political parties, but not by the PP where those who corrupted the operation nest: promoted by PSOE and the United Left.
The sale of the plot to Martinsa was warp among bambalins but greased by overwhelming majority of the municipal plenary in 2006. With the favorable votes of the PP, whose leaders were going to take hundreds of thousands of euros, but also of the two opposition parties. The Acts still available They reflect that the PSOE contributed the need to create an underground parking, educational and cultural equipment or the conditioning of green areas. The United Left opted for the relocation of the neighbors.
“A really exciting road to construction of the city begins,” The councilor said Before obtaining the eleven favorable votes of the PP, seven of the PSOE and one more of IU to approve the urban plan.
Shortly after several cooperatives were born: one of them, Arganda progressdriven by the PSOE, and another, called San Isidro meadowlinked to IU. The two bought plots and both ended in creditors, with several cooperatives denouncing having lost their money without having seen the promised houses. Some of these floors were acquired by relatives Of the opposition councilors that that day, without knowing that there were millionaire commissions behind, approved the urban plan. For example, by Victoria Moreno, then Councilor of the PSOE, and Libertad Martínez, representative of IU in the Consistory, as published at the time 20 minutes.
“In Arganda was Vox Populi”
Alberto Escribano was five years old when the ball that the National Court judges these days was perpetrated. Two decades later he is the mayor of the town for the Popular Party after unseating the PSOE of Guillermo Hita in 2023: “That in Arganda was Vox Populi, since childhood I have heard that in this City Council nobody sent and that it was sent from the Development Society. It is the feeling that has always been, the climate that everyone knew in Arganda and is a shame and gives quite disgust how you can get to that point, ”he explains to Eldiario.es.
The EU-124 plot clearly differs from the rest of Arganda del Rey by the color and height of the buildings to the point of looking like a different locality. “The most striking thing is that you arrive in Arganda and see clearly where the illegality is then, which the judge will now have to say. There the building was modified to enter more houses and those are the consequences. We have an arganda area that is new and that two cars cannot pass along the same street, buildings of up to 13 plants that had ever allowed in no area of the city. “That is what we are going to see in Arganda always.”
The councilor speaks from the same building where the greatest ball of the Gürtel was perpetrated two decades ago. And his explanations draw how corruption can leave an indelible mark in a city in addition to a hole in public coffers. He explains, he had to pay several thousand euros of a fine of his pocket that the courts had imposed that the Mayor’s Office of Arganda occupied for breaching a sentence related to this plot: “I was paying a fine for a decision of when I was not even ten years old, it is a shame.”
The discredit of the population of Arganda with politics, therefore, is not difficult to believe. “We as a party have paid an immense price,” explains Escribano, who arrived at the City Hall after eight years of socialist government in the city. More quantifiable is the price paid by the municipality: “Fruit of all that here is an adjustment plan because the debt is immense. We are paying all that now, that we have almost 100 million euros of debt, ”he laments.
Two decades later the cranes continue to raise buildings in the EU-124 while some of their plots are still empty, used by the neighbors to walk the dogs and serving as a passage zone for those who cross from one area to another of the city. The narrow streets are completely blocked when any of the trucks have to stop to load or download the material of one of the works. Meanwhile, the case is judged at the National Court with a condemnation prognosis after the confessions of corrupt and corruptors: of the 21 defendants only one official has not reached a pact with the Prosecutor’s Office. Gürtel only has one more piece to judge.
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