Rato and Zaplana on the bench, Aznar as speaker

They were two of the most powerful men of the Popular Party and the State in the late 90s and early 2000s, although 20 years later, after being in provisional prison and both immersed in trials for different cases of corruption linked to that time , no one in the PP seems to know Rodrigo Rato and Eduardo Zaplana. No leader of the current leadership – or any other position – has made mention of them in recent days despite the fact that this week both have testified from the dock. They have not even received the support of José María Aznar, who was the one who encouraged them and kept them as his most trusted men in the party and the Government.

While his former collaborators fight with Justice, Aznar has professionalized himself as an international lecturer and presents himself as a reference in the most ultra-liberal forums in Spain and Latin America. The still president of the FAES Foundation has established himself as a representative of the most right wing of the PP. And it is common for him to feel confident in each of his public interventions, to talk about honesty or exemplarity, to launch alarmist messages against the progressive Executive with serious accusations in the same style as Vox and to try to guide the strategy of his party's leadership from his position. now in the hands of Alberto Núñez Feijóo.

Aznar was President of the Government between 1996 and 2004, eight years in which he kept Rodrigo Rato, vice president and main strategist of his economic policy, as one of the pillars of his Executive. For a long time, even when the first signs of his allegedly illicit activities were known, in right-wing circles he was considered a guru and the architect of the economic growth that Spain experienced in those years, something that those same sectors came to describe like a “miracle”. In that same period Eduardo Zaplana was president of the Valencian Community (until 2002) and, later, Minister of Labor of the Aznar Government and spokesperson for it between September 2003 and April 2004.

While Aznar tries to give lessons in all the forums to which he is invited, the paths of two of his main collaborators for years, Rato and Zaplana, have come face to face with the past. Both have been prosecuted for cases of corruption linked to their time as public servants, they have gone to jail and serious accusations against them.

The third trial of Rato

Rato faces more than 70 years in prison for allegedly defrauding more than 8.5 million euros and for alleged bribes he collected when he was president of Bankia. It is the third time that he has sat on the bench in less than a decade: he was already convicted for the Caja Madrid black card scandal and was acquitted of the Bankia IPO fiasco. Now he is being tried for an activity that began in 1999, when he was minister and vice president of the Government, and would have continued to develop when he was president of the IMF, of Caja Madrid and also when he rang the bell that announced the ruinous but legal IPO. from Bankia. Anti-corruption accuses him of 11 tax crimes and other crimes of money laundering and corruption between individuals.

During the trial sessions held this week, the former vice president refused to answer the questions of the anti-corruption prosecutor, whom he accused of having set up a “fabulation.” He also charged against the officials who have investigated his enormous assets. “I don't know where these people come from”, “it's outrageous” or “they take us for fools” were the disqualifications with which he addressed the Treasury technicians and the State lawyer who is prosecuting the case on Wednesday.

A day later, on Thursday, Rato again attacked the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which he accused of using “inquisitorial practices” and promoting an “unpresentable fiction.” But in the first moments of the interrogation by his lawyer, María Massó, the former vice president did recognize that he had been “wrong” to take advantage of the tax amnesty that the Government of Mariano Rajoy approved in 2012. He did it to try to regularize assets and income that had escaped the control of the Treasury. And it was precisely that movement that ended up giving rise to the investigation into his assets that were the subject of the trial.

Anti-corruption maintains that “far from having regularized [fondos] neither administratively nor, even less, criminally” he used that measure “as a vehicle for laundering or cleaning up the illicit defrauded contributions that he had been carrying for years through his foreign assets.” Furthermore, the Prosecutor's Office defends that all the amounts hidden from the Treasury would have also been the subject of “laundering mechanics” through “opaque accounts” and no less opaque financial “trusts”.

Everything against Zaplana

As for Zaplana, the former Valencian president has been sitting in the dock since the end of March after two postponements of the trial – due to the illness of his lawyer – for the so-called 'Erial case'. Based on police investigations, Anticorruption places him at the head of a plot that was dedicated to collecting commissions for the concessions of ITV licenses and wind farms during his time in the Valencian Generalitat. The Public Ministry is asking for 19 years in prison and a fine of 40 million euros for money laundering, bribery, membership in a criminal organization, administrative prevarication and falsification of a commercial document. The alleged commissions of the plot amount to 20.6 million euros.

Tuesday was the first session of his testimony. In it, Zaplana denied any involvement in the plot targeting the launderer of the plot, the Uruguayan lawyer Fernando Belhot. “He is a well-known person in Madrid who, as far as I know, was dedicated to business,” said Aznar's former minister. Zaplana recognized a “extensive relationship” with the bleacher, one of the main witnesses in the case who handed over to the investigating court almost seven million euros awarded to the former president of the Generalitat Valenciana. But the latter limited himself to ensuring that Belhot proposed “some economic operation” that “has never come to fruition.”

The former minister also denied that he knew Marcos Benavent, the self-proclaimed 'money junkie' who was precisely the one who had the documentation seized that allowed him to pull the thread of the 'Erial case' and locate an alleged Zaplana loot abroad. The prosecutor, Pablo Ponce, specifically asked him if he had spoken to Benavent “recently” and Zaplana denied it. Furthermore, he explained that in the telephone conversations intercepted by the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard they refer to him as “chief” as a common nickname given his political career as mayor of Benidorm, first, president of the Generalitat Valencia, later, and minister. “It is a nickname that, unfortunately for me, many people use, even today, and look, my situation is unfortunate,” he said.

Despite Zaplana's declaration of innocence, just one day after he uttered those words, on Wednesday, the confessed figurehead of the plot, Joaquín Barceló, 'Pachano', who is a childhood friend of the former president, testified at the trial. Despite the relationship, he directly accused Zaplana and said that all the money that the authorities have found in tax havens is also from the former minister. Barceló explained that the former leader of the PP asked him to act as a front man in companies in Luxembourg to guard “money that he did not expect from an operation in which he had practically not participated.” It was, as he later discovered, money that came from the awarding of the ITVs.

Several of the accused have reached an agreement with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, a lethal alliance in legal terms for Zaplana's defense since it could lead to his conviction.

Aznar's lessons

While Rato and Zaplana face serious accusations and testify in court, Aznar continues with his extensive activity as a lecturer. In recent years –especially after the rehabilitation of him as a strategist by Pablo Casado when he became president of the PP, in 2018–, the former president has established himself as one of the most radical right-wing references since FAES and others. ultraliberal organizations. His words are always taken into account by the PP leadership, which remembers that he is the political father of leaders with an important influence in Feijóo such as the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, or its chief of staff, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, who became the spokesperson for one of the governments of the 'popular' former president.

Last week, Aznar tried to mark the PP's position regarding the invasion of Gaza. “To those who refer to the creation of a Palestinian State, what do they mean by a Palestinian State? That does not exist. That is absurd,” he said, on the 4th. Days later, Feijóo did open himself to the recognition of Palestine, although Genoa does not believe that the current moment is the right time despite the massacre in Gaza by Israel that has already caused more than 30,000 deaths. .

Ignoring the procedural situation of those who were his closest collaborators, Aznar has no hesitation when it comes to talking about honesty or exemplarity in Spanish politics. Just a month ago he stated that the current situation is “the moment of greatest crisis in Spain since the beginning of democracy.” “I have never known any government that has put its destiny and future in the hands of those who want to destroy this country, except this one,” he added. This is a thesis repeated by the PP leadership and also by Vox.

Despite the serious accusations against Rodrigo Rato, his main economic strategist, whom he promoted to minister and vice president, Aznar also continues to give lessons on the economy. “One of Spain's problems is that we only have one Loot and what we need is at least 15. It is not being made easier because the country is busy with other things,” he said at the end of February. What's more, without mentioning it, he defended one of the main pillars of Rato's management: the privatization of public companies that the socialist Felipe González had already started before. In Aznar's opinion, “the great economic leap in Spain in terms of prosperity came with liberalization and deregulation” and “that is where Spain has to be.”