The PP maintains the mayor of Marbella as a candidate despite the prosecution of her husband for drug trafficking

Ángeles Muñoz will be the PP candidate to revalidate the Mayor’s Office of Marbella next May. This is confirmed by different sources from the party’s national leadership, which has to give the go-ahead to all the headliners for the regional and municipal elections. And all despite the indictment for drug trafficking that the National Court has issued against her husband, Lars Gunnar Broberg, and against her stepson, Joakim Peter Broberg, and which places them one step away from the oral trial, as elDiario has advanced. it is.

Muñoz has been mayor of Marbella since 2007 (except for a brief period of two years between 2015 and 2017) and is seeking a fifth term. A position that makes her one of the main references of the Andalusian PP. In fact, President Juan Manuel Moreno placed her as coordinator of the Large Municipalities area after the last regional congress. Her successive electoral successes make her a safe value to retain one of the main squares of Malaga and the entire region in the crucial elections scheduled for the spring of next year.

These elections are fundamental for Alberto Núñez Feijóo and his expectations of reaching Moncloa at the end of 2023. The national leadership has set itself the goal of winning an autonomous government over the PSOE to launch the general campaign, but the success of the strategy It also involves not losing your own places. And Marbella is one of the essentials.

But on Muñoz’s path to achieve a fifth term as mayor, a police and judicial investigation has intersected, which has implicated Spanish and Swedish authorities, and which has concluded with an indictment against her husband and his son of a previous marriage. The Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office of the Court and the investigating judge, Manuel García Castellón, indirectly attribute to the Swedish businessman, based in Marbella for decades, a crime of “active” membership in a criminal organization and another of money laundering from drug trafficking.

The investigation, and the instruction of the judge, also points to the involvement of the stepson. In one of the conversations intercepted by the UDEF and revealed by elDiario.es, Joakim Broberg says: “The city is ours, the Junta… fucking Andalusia.” The unit of the National Police concludes in a report: “From the intercepted telephone conversations, the great influence that the Swede has on urban issues is clear and this is due to family relations with the Marbella councillor.”

Despite the investigations and judicial decisions, the PP currently has no intention of replacing Muñoz. In fact, both in public and in private they try to isolate the mayor from what happened in her family. “It is something that does not affect her,” they point out from the leadership of Feijóo’s party. “She is not charged,” they insist.

The final decision on Muñoz will not be long in coming. There are exactly seven months left for the elections and the PP Electoral Committee has to give the go-ahead to the candidates. At the head of the organization is Diego Calvo, from Coruña, appointed by Feijóo last April. The decision of the Committee is therefore the decision of the president.

Muñoz has coincided this week in the Senate with Elías Bendodo, who was his boss in the PP of Malaga until just a few months ago, when he made the definitive leap to national politics as number three of the Feijóo PP. Despite the attempts of the press in the Upper House, Muñoz has not wanted to comment on the prosecution of her husband and her stepson.

Bendodo and Muñoz greeted each other affectionately in the corridor of the Senate. A boost from the general coordinator of the PP, the one who was Juan Manuel Moreno’s right-hand man in the Junta de Andalucía and in the party at the regional level, president of the Diputación de Málaga between 2011 and 2019, when he made the leap to the regional government. He led the provincial PP for more years: from 2008 to 2022. His successor, Patricia Navarro, was elected at a congress at the beginning of the month that was held precisely in Marbella, as its mayor proudly announced in an Instagram post in which He wanted to “specially thank” Bendodo’s “support” “in the most important moments and his work and commitment to Marbella during these 14 years” at the head of the organization.

Since 2015, the mayor has combined her position in Marbella with that of elected senator. As she appears in her statements, Muñoz does not receive a salary as such for her work as a councilor, but she does receive remuneration from the City Council for her attendance at municipal meetings: 600 euros for each plenary session and 200 by plenary committees. She herself declares an income of 84,621 euros apart from her salary as a senator.

That salary as a senator would add up to a total of 86,004.8 euros a year: the common salary for all the representatives, the compensation for being from outside Madrid and the complement as vice president of a commission. She is also a deputy spokesperson on committee, but Senate regulations do not allow double-charging for committee positions. Her net personal income tax fee totaled 40,068.83 euros in 2018, the last year for which there is data on the website of the Upper House.

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