Gürtel: the trial that the PP would like to hush up

ARA in English - En Directe ^ | 25-Oct-2017 | Staff

[ptsal]

n Madrid’s Audiencia Nacional yesterday they began to read the closing statements for the trial of the first part of the Gürtel case (1999-2005). This is the biggest corruption trial in the history of Spanish democracy and it involves a single party, the Partido Popular, which would love to see it hushed up. The prosecutor was particularly emphatic in her final remarks and penalty request for the 37 defendants. She explained that the ringleaders of Gürtel set up a slush fund to bribe PP officials, which became their “way of life”.

The trouble is that Gürtel was not merely a corrupt network that lined the pockets of a few unscrupulous elected officials, as the PP has argued, but it actually turned the PP’s Madrid HQ into the group’s operating base. The prosecutor herself stressed that, as well as individual people, the PP as a political party was funded illegally. It is unbelievable that a racket that involved the party’s treasurer, Luis Bárcenas (who is facing 39 years in jail), was not known to his immediate superiors and, in particular, to the man who had appointed him: PM Mariano Rajoy.

[ptsal]

***snip***Bribing politicans....whodda thunk.

The criminal gang followed a very simple pattern: they would bribe PP officials in exchange for awarding government contracts to companies who paid them a percentage in return. It was a sweet deal which proves to what extent corruption was part and parcel of the last wave of speculative growth in Spain, between 1995 and 2007.

[padubis]

The sins of the Partido Popular don’t make saints out of the disingenuous manipulators in the Catalan separatist clown car.

[ptsal]

Same lawyer represents Wikileaks.
Baltasar Garzón