Meetings at the headquarters of Torreal, the company of billionaire Juan Abelló; an action plan that includes “the defense of private property against housing squatting”; and an award for the former judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón to “honor Justice as a fundamental pillar of our democracy.”
These are some of the latest movements by Fundación Civismo, a think tank financed by the ultra-rich like Abelló or the owner of Prosegur, Helena Revoredo, and whose president, the Navarrese lobbyist Julio Pomés, has even compared Pedro Sánchez to the Nazi Goebbels. The entity, which every year celebrates what it describes as “fiscal liberation day”, has just sent its partners the invitation to the ceremony to present its annual “Civil Society” award.
This year it was the turn of the former magistrate, who retired in September forcibly for reasons of age and known for his closeness to the PP. After having refused to charge María Dolores de Cospedal in the Kitchen case after the attempts of the former general secretary of the PP to sabotage the PP’s corruption cases, García Castellón has on his service record his unsuccessful attempts to prosecute several politicians from Podemos. Until this year he insisted on accusing Carles Puigdemont of terrorism, whom he tried to accuse in the midst of negotiations for Sánchez’s investiture.
The former judge was the instructor of the so-called Villarejo case. last summer proposed to judge BBVA and its former presidentFrancisco González, for hiring the corrupt commissioner to spy on, among others, the former president of Sacyr Luis del Rivero or Juan Abelló himself.
“Outstanding career”
“This year, we wanted to honor Justice as a fundamental pillar of our democracy. On behalf of this, the Civismo Foundation will award this 2024 Civil Society Award to Judge Manuel García-Castellón, with an outstanding career as head of the Central Court of Instruction number 6 and as a member of the National Court,” reads the registration form to attend. to the act that he has sent to his partners, and to which elDiario.es has had access
In previous editions, the Civics award has gone to the current president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, or the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. Last year, the chosen one was Jano García, ultra-liberal writer, YouTuber, former professional poker player and occasional collaborator of the communicator Iker Jiménez, who these days has launched into spreading hoaxes about the DANA of Valencia in his program on Mediaset.
The Civismo award to García Castellón will be presented on November 28 at 7:00 p.m. in the auditorium of the Renta 4 Foundation in Madrid. This investment bank was founded by another Civismo donor, the financier and state lawyer on leave Juan Carlos Ureta.
The Renta 4 Foundation was one of the names that appeared among Civismo donors in 2020, the last year in which this foundation detailed in its accounts who finances its activity. Then the names of Torreal SA, from Abelló, also appeared. The eighth Spanish fortune according to Forbes, with a net worth of 2.9 billion, is one of the billionaires who have joined the trend of free investment companies (SIL) to pay 1% taxes after the reinforcement of controls on sicavs.
Along with Abelló, among those Civismo donors appeared two other names from the famous Forbes Spain list: the president of Prosegur, very close like Abelló to the emeritus king, Juan Carlos I, former director of Endesa or Mediaset and who is the thirtieth fortune of the country, according to that publication, which attributes 1.2 billion assets to it; and Víctor de Urrutia, owner of the CVNE wineries, former vice president of Iberdrola, Álava’s first fortune and in 72nd place in that ranking of the rich.
Other lesser-known billionaires also appeared on the list of Civismo donors, such as Víctor Ruiz, also a patron of the foundation and who is the first shareholder of Azkoyen, founder of the bankrupt engineering company Eurofinsa and former shareholder of Libertad Digital; the investor Francisco García Paramés (owner of another ultra think tank in Madrid, the Juan de Mariana Institute), or the financier Claudio Aguirre, cousin of Esperanza Aguirre and also patron of Civismo.
The Vargas Llosa foundation also appeared, in which Javier Fernández-Lasquetty, also close to Juan de Mariana, is a director. Lasquetty was Ayuso’s economic guru until 2023 and is considered the architect of Aguirre’s health privatizations in the Community of Madrid. Already fully involved in the private sector and in various lobbies, he joined the Civismo board last summer.
A few months earlier, on December 5, the current Civismo action plan was approved. This document foresees income from “private contributions” of 234,000 euros for this year and, among the planned actions, a new edition of the so-called “Freedom School” at the María Cristina university center of the Monasterio de El Escorial, and various conferences and gatherings.
As the first of its actions, the plan planned to carry out “research” work this year on “the strategic sectors that make up Spain’s GDP and the economic value of public and private investments in social, educational and cultural sectors, the defense of private property in the face of housing squatting, the efficiency of tax reforms, the situation of the labor market, the necessary independence of the judiciary and the preparation of the Economic Freedom Index of Spain.
Documentation to which elDiario.es has had access reflects that, although Civismo has its own headquarters (currently, it is located on Paseo de la Habana in Madrid), the meetings of the board have been held until a year ago. in the offices of Torreal, Abelló’s holding company, at number 1 Fortuny Street in Madrid.
The meeting held on November 15 was convened there to approve the 2024 Action Plan; or the one that approved the 2022 accounts on April 14, 2023, when the entity ended up making a record expense of 304,677 euros, according to its accounts for that year; or the one that on June 30, 2022 elected Jorge González-Gallarza Hernández as the new director of the foundation. This regular collaborator of the Disenso foundation, Vox’s think tank, spent just over a year in that position.
He was succeeded in September 2023 as general director by Albert Guivernau, who a few months earlier had been number two on the lists for Barcelona City Council for Valents, a defunct and ephemeral conservative and constitutionalist party.
Civismo has also been financed by not-too-well-known ultra-rich people like the Huarte, heirs of the Navarrese builder Félix Huarte, who made gold during the dictatorship and built the Valley of the Fallen or the Santiago Bernabéu stadium. The think tank was originally closely linked to Navarra, but ended up moving to Madrid.
Its headquarters in the capital was for years adjacent to the Huarte building, on Paseo de la Castellana and a stone’s throw from the Bernabéu. From there, a huge banner against Pedro Sánchez was displayed in May 2020, which was echoed on his networks by a then not very well-known tweeter named Alvise Pérez.
The entity that contributed the most money to Civismo in 2020 was Alpireva Investments SL, owned by the French fruit and vegetable businessman Alexandre Pierron D´ Arbonne, vice president of the think tank and closely linked to Navarra. His profile bears certain parallels with that of another French billionaire living in Spain, Gregoire Bontoux-Halley, heir to Carrefour who has injected millions into the heiress of the far-right Intereconomía TV.
Another person closely linked to Civismo for years has been Carlos Espinosa de los Monteros, former Commissioner of Marca España and father of former Vox deputy Iván Espinosa de los Monteros. The general secretary of the foundation is the Complutense professor Francisco Cabrillo, whom Ayuso appointed in March as a director of the Chamber of Accounts of the Community of Madrid together with former president Joaquín Leguina, with a public salary of 101,059.32 euros per year.
Cabrillo was already appointed by Aguirre in 2004 as president of the Economic and Social Council of the Community of Madrid. Shortly after his resignation (in 2012) he briefly presided over Libertad Digital.
Among the people who have advised Civismo are Daniel Lacalle (former “head of Strategy”), Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Fernando del Pino (from the family that owns Ferrovial), José María Rotellar, current part-time advisor to the Madrid government, or Ignacio Ruiz-Jarabo, former director of the Tax Agency under Aznar and columnist in right-wing media.
This extensive list also includes CEOE historians José Luis Feito and Juan Iranzo, convicted of Caja Madrid’s black cards; Fernando Becker (former director of Iberdrola and closely linked to the PP), the economist Lorenzo Bernaldo de Quirós, the former diplomat Inocencio Arias, the professors Benito Arruñada and Rafael Pampillón, Luis María Linde, former governor of the Bank of Spain with the PP, and Fernando Eguidazu, advisor to the supervisor and senior foreign official with Mariano Rajoy.
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