A former deputy for the head of government’s party, Pedro Sanchez, would have touched bribes in exchange for services to businesses.
by Sandrine Morel (Madrid, corresponding)
bribes, prostitutes and cocaine. A hundred days of the municipal and regional elections of May, and ten months from the legislative elections, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), in power in Madrid, would have gladly gone from the revelations of the “Mediador” affair.
According to investigators, these “gifts” were paid by several business leaders to a socialist deputy, the Canary Juan Bernardo Fuentes – better known as “Tito Berni”, and to a Civil Guard general Retirement, Francisco Espinosa, in exchange for facilities to obtain public contracts, an acceleration of European grant files, the erasure of fines or other privileges. They have been doing the greasy cabbage of the Spanish press for a week.
The People’s Party (pp, right) and the far -right formation Vox announced their intention to be a civil party in court and asked for the creation of a parliamentary commission of inquiry, “to make its dignity In the Parliament, “said PP president Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, who called the” ethical bomb “affair for the PSOE.
The survey has shown that several business leaders cited in the alleged corruption network have been received by Mr. Fuentes within the Congress of Deputies. And the scabrous details on the “catalogs” of prostitutes offered to those involved are made public, at the very moment when socialists work on a law against the trafficking and exploitation of human beings, aimed at the abolition of prostitution.
Aware of the dangers of such a scandal on the eve of the elections, the PSOE excluded Mr. Fuentes and put pressure on him to give up his seat in Parliament the same day that his name appeared among the involved persons. “When a political leader commits an action that does not correspond to the exemplarity criteria required by the PSOE, the action is clear: expulsion of the party and withdrawal of the mandate,” explained the head of government, Pedro Sanchez. He himself came to power in 2018 following a motion of distrust filed against the conservative Mariano Rajoy, motivated by the condemnation of the PP in a corruption scandal. “I would like other parties to do the same,” he slipped.
a climate of strong political tension
The spokespersons of the PSOE tried to return the right to its own turpitudes, recalling the influence trafficking affecting its elected officials or the suspicious heritage of the mayor of Marbella, Angeles Muñoz, including the husband and the beautiful -Fils are accused of drug trafficking and money laundering. “The Mediador affair is repugnant and shabby, but it strikes an insignificant basic deputy and apart from it, there is nothing else,” says a socialist parliamentarian under the cover of anonymity.
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