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The Government of Juan Manuel Moreno, placidly settled in the absolute majority of the PP, has completed its first hundred days this week without surprises or fuss. The Andalusian president has weathered escalating inflation, four consecutive months of rising unemployment and the state of alarm due to drought (with the swamps at 22% of their capacity) with some comfort.
In five months, eight bills have been approved – rescuing those that remained in the drawer with the dissolution of Parliament due to the electoral advance – and Moreno launched his sixth massive tax cut, which placed Andalusia at the epicenter of the tax debate in Spain, and placed Moreno as a national benchmark for the PP against Pedro Sánchez, but also against Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
But the honeymoon ended last Thursday, when the opposition groups in Parliament managed, for the first time, to twist the president’s gesture in a control session, by inserting direct references to the criminal plot that It splashes the Marbella Town Hall, one of the political and symbolic bastions of the Andalusian PP.
The National Court is investigating an international drug trafficking network that allegedly laundered money through urban works awarded by the Marbella Town Hall to front companies linked to the husband and stepson of the mayoress, Ángeles Muñoz. The investigation does not directly implicate Muñoz, but it does abound in details about the political influences in Marbella that his stepson, a Swedish national, used in a framework in which “crimes related to corruption” are perceived. “We have the Junta de Andalucía, we have Marbella, we have Estepona, we have everything. The city is ours. Basically, we have the whole fucking Andalusia”, he is heard in one of the telephone conversations tapped by the National Police, and published by this newspaper.
That “we have the Junta de Andalucía” refers directly to the victory of the PP in the elections on June 19. “The matter is very murky, whether or not she is charged,” admitted a senior popular leader in the corridors of Parliament on Thursday, during a plenary recess. The popular ones privately acknowledge “concern and concern” about this matter, but the order is not to speak publicly about it and silence has been imposed in response. Not a word more. The argument goes as far as this: “the mayoress is not accused”, the case that affects the Marbella Town Hall has already “been archived”, and “respect for justice”. Untill there.
Neither Moreno nor any senior leader of the Andalusian PP has wanted to publicly confirm Muñoz’s candidacy for re-election, seven months before the municipal elections. Behind the scenes, the Socialists slipped that Aguirre is the cousin of the mayoress of Marbella and that, “perhaps”, he should have “abstained” in the vote of the Board that decided not to accept the question on the matter.
The general coordinator of the party, Elías Bendodo, avoided answering this question on Friday in Malaga, referring to the regional and provincial leadership of the PP, chaired by Patricia Navarro, a person of her complete confidence. “On this issue I refer to the provincial president, who has been very clear, and I obviously support her.”
Navarro has not publicly commented on the Marbella plot. His number two, the deputy José Antonio Carmona, did declare on October 26 that the matter “has nothing to do with the management of the mayoress of Marbella.” From October 26 to today, this newspaper has published new excerpts from the investigation on Marbella, with public adjudications and emails under suspicion.
Bendodo’s responsibility, as number three of the national PP, reaches the candidacies of the provincial capitals, but Marbella – with 142,000 inhabitants – is outside his powers, warns a source in his environment. However, the deputy from Malaga also presided over the PP of his province for fifteen years, he continues to exert considerable weight in the direction inherited by his substitute and continues to be, de facto, one of President Moreno’s court advisors. “It is difficult to think that nothing moves in his territory without passing through his hand,” warns a parliamentarian from his province.
The criminal plot in Marbella has slipped into the Andalusian Parliament with two immediate consequences: it has awakened the main opposition party, the PSOE, which finds in the shadow of corruption in the PP a way to shake up the stability of the president. And it has grated the nerves of the popular and those around Moreno, who on Thursday dodged the three attempts by his rivals to get him to speak in parliament on the case of drug trafficking and money laundering that is affecting his party partner.
The Andalusian president referred to the regulations of the Chamber to avoid the references that Manuel Gavira (Vox), Inmaculada Nieto (Por Andalucía) and Juan Espadas (PSOE) introduced in their questions during the control session. “I refer to what your question says verbatim,” Moreno told Nieto, after acknowledging that there was a certain margin in the parliamentary habit to sneak in other issues in face-to-face meetings with the president, apart from those included in the He asks that the groups address him. “This is happening in Andalusia, not on the moon. They are very serious events and require a political assessment from the president of the Board,” Espadas inquired. “His silence about the scandal of corruption in the Marbella City Hall is very ugly,” Nieto added.
The PP’s resistance to the Marbella plot becoming a subject of parliamentary debate, linking the government party to a case of corruption and drug trafficking, was made clear on Thursday morning, when the Board of the Chamber stopped a question from maximum news of the PSOE so that the Minister of the Presidency could pronounce on the matter. The highest management body of Parliament, controlled by the absolute majority of the PP, did not want to accept the question from the Socialists, arguing that the matter “was within municipal competence” and that the aid from the Board for which they were interested, and that They went to the Marbella Town Hall, they were from 2011.
The PSOE accused the president of the Chamber, the popular Jesús Aguirre, of “vetoing” his question and carrying out his work as a “cacique”, presented a reconsideration letter to the Table and demanded that the rejection be expressed in writing to know the Legal arguments, if any.
Hours later, Aguirre summoned the members of the Bureau in an extraordinary way at the end of the plenary session to “resolve” the controversy, without waiting another week. At the meeting, not a report signed by the senior lawyer was presented, but a resolution of the governing body of the Chamber ratifying its rejection of the PSOE’s question for “technical reasons.” The decision was approved with the sole votes of the PP, since the members of Vox supported the socialist initiative. Behind the scenes, the Socialists slipped that the president of the Andalusian Parliament is the cousin of the mayoress of Marbella and that “perhaps” he should have “abstained” in the vote.
That extraordinary meeting, held when night had already fallen on Parliament, witnessed a “heated” discussion between the groups. The socialists accuse the popular ones of having “threatened” the second vice president of the Table, Irene García, with “investigating” her previous management as mayoress of Sanlúcar de Barrameda (Cádiz) and taking questions about it to Parliament, if they persisted in their interest in the plot of Marbella; the popular ones make the socialists ugly for having “invented a smoke screen” to cover the imminent entry into prison of former president José Antonio Griñán, convicted of embezzlement and prevarication for the ERE macrofraud.
Marbella has the highest per capita income on the Costa del Sol, it became popular in the 90s under the cloudy shadow of its mayor, Jesús Gil, it was the first Andalusian municipality intervened by the Junta for its urban excesses and the scene of the largest corruption plot in the middle of the real estate boom (the Malaya case).
