And another controversial case in the Madrid PP. Three vice-secretaries of the PP of Madrid in the district of La Latina denounced in 2023 and in writing Alberto González, councilor of the City Council in the capital, secretary of the PP of the 21 districts of the capital, president of the party in Latina and right-hand man of Alfonso Serrano, general secretary of the popular in the region. The officials, who resigned last year, but who continue to be members, denounce pressures, coercion and orders to spy on other members around the current president of Nuevas Generaciones, Beatriz Fanjul, in addition to alleged economic irregularities at the PP headquarters in Latina, as EL PAÍS revealed last Wednesday. This is not the first case of alleged espionage attempts and irregularities that have affected the Madrid PP in recent years. Here is a tour of the three main episodes that have emerged in a party that has governed the region since 1995.
He Spies case (2008)
EL PAÍS published this case for the first time in January 2009, when it reported that a group of former agents of the National Police and the Civil Guard under the salary of the Ministry of the Interior had carried out daily monitoring – reflected in some reports – on several adversaries. from the then president Esperanza Aguirre: like the counselor Alfredo Prada; and Manuel Cobo, vice mayor and right-hand man of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and later Minister of Justice with Mariano Rajoy. This espionage would have occurred in April 2008, in the middle of the battle for power in the PP after Mariano Rajoy lost the elections in March 2008 to José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
These reports represented, then, the beginning of a case that took a decade to reach trial and that survived three archiving attempts promoted by the investigating judge. During the oral hearing, two of the accused stated that they had been given “illegal orders” to follow other PP politicians due to the “special interest of Ignacio González”, then vice president of the Community.
On February 21, 2019, the case was closed with the six defendants acquitted. The jury's decision, which was made by the minimum (five votes to four), came a week after the Madrid Assembly declared the monitoring within the investigation commission against corruption proven. The opinion of said body, approved with the votes of the opposition, considered Esperanza Aguirre, Ignacio González, Francisco Granados and Sergio Gamón, also a senior official in the PP Government at the time, to be politically responsible. “It is evident that the monitoring occurred, since there is graphic evidence and recorded conversations that corroborate it,” the commission stated in its resolution.
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A machinery related to Genoa sought evidence against Ayuso (2022)
These accusations of irregularities and espionage ended with the PP split in two, in the air, and with the departure of Pablo Casado. It all started in mid-October 2021 and ended in January 2022. Various collaborators and workers from the capital's City Council hatched a plan to investigate the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. The majority of these Council workers were hired by the national leadership of the PP. They worked hard to find definitive proof that the brother of the president of the region, Tomás Ayuso, had received a bribe of 283,000 euros. The bribe would supposedly come from a hand-picked contract delivered by the Ministry of Health to a company owned by a close friend of the Madrid president. The award was 1,512,500 euros for the purchase of 200,000 masks using the emergency route, a tool available to public administrations to accelerate any purchase or management in periods of crisis, such as the pandemic. The mask would cost more than seven euros. The purchase occurred in a context of full health crisis. This contract was hidden in the Transparency Portal of the Community of Madrid.
The work of this group of collaborators from the City Council, supposedly encouraged by Ángel Carromero, the man from Génova 13 in the Consistory and general coordinator of the Mayor's Office until he presented his resignation to Almeida himself those days, consisted at first in disseminating that information through various media. What's more, they met with various journalists from different digital and print media. They told them their plan to try to find out if Ayuso's brother was involved in the matter.
After meeting with the different informants, they themselves began a round of contacts with up to two detective companies. The objective was very clear: yes or yes, a bank document had to be obtained that corresponded to the supposed deposit of the 283,000 by Ayuso's friend to the account of his brother. Negotiations with these companies were unsuccessful. These law firms told them that it was an unviable and illegal maneuver, although, as other sources pointed out at the time, there was also talk of a high price to at least try.
“Mark with a cross and collect information” (2024)
The last case was known last Wednesday. Three deputy secretaries of the PP of Madrid in the district of La Latina, among them a leader of New Generations (NNGG) of the Community, denounced in 2023 and in writing the mayor González, councilor of the Madrid City Council and leader of the party that occupies the secretariat of the PP of the 21 districts of the capital. They denounce pressures, coercion and orders to spy on other members close to the current president of Nuevas Generaciones, Beatriz Fanjul, in addition to alleged economic irregularities at the PP headquarters in Latina. Two of them denounced it in writing in mid-2023 before the National Committee of Rights and Guarantees, chaired by José Antonio Monago. The three sent a communication to Alfonso Serrano, the number two of the PP of Madrid, as regional general secretary, in February 2023, but there was no response. It was not
until June 2023, when the case reached Genoa, that the Madrid PP decided to open a file and begin internal investigations.
One of the complainants states in his complaint that Councilman González asked him to spy on members of the party. “Alberto González,” the letter reads, “asks me to spy on the national president of Nuevas Generaciones, Beatriz Fanjul, and her entourage. “Let him mark with a cross those members of Madrid who are related to the national leadership and collect information about other people, including Ricardo Calle, advisor to the City Council in the last legislature, and Alejandro Cortés, among others.” “For obvious reasons,” explains the author of the complaint, “I can't do it and I start giving Alberto his time. [González]”. “In those moments, I warn certain people with whom I am friends to be careful, because they have ordered me to spy on them,” she writes.
The complainant also explains that González does not want members of the New Generations of the national leadership in the New Generations group in Madrid. “Everything occurs within a context in which a New Generations congress was coming up in Madrid, and González had a lot of weight when it came to drawing up the lists,” he explains. This complainant writes to the National Committee of Rights and Guarantees once he has already resigned, disappointed because senior party officials have not shown interest in his accusations. The president of the committee, José Antonio Monago, immediately opened a file and referred the case to the regional Committee of Rights and Guarantees, which has been studying the case for four months, according to popular sources.
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