It happens in life and passes in politics. The past always returns. Sometimes, without warning and when one less awaits it. Alberto Núñez Feijóo did not have, of course, that the public conversation turned this week of the Cerdán case to the Montoro case. Nor that a judicial investigation of more than seven years in which there has not been a single filtration – or, chance – shake the PP in full offensive against Pedro Sánchez. The scandal is considerable and is also “a memory dose for the progressive electorate disappointed with the PSOE about what the right governments were.” They believe it in Moncloa.
Electronic emails found by chance, an anonymous complaint and a judicial investigation that has remained under summary secret for seven years is the starting point of a judicial case for which the former Minister of Finance of the PP Cristóbal Montoro and another 27 senior positions of his ministry, professional environment and companies of companies have been charged. He is accused of being behind an alleged network of influences created to favor certain companies from Finance through tax reforms as they were managed in a consultant that was founded by Montoro himself before returning to the government in 2011. According to the investigation, the companies (gasists, electrical and renewable) paid almost eight million euros to the office in exchange in exchange for this to influence the decisions of the Mariano Rajoy Executive (2011-2018).
All this was known in the same week when the Supreme dismantled the maneuver of the Judge Peinado to impute the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, in the open case against Begoña Gómez; in which Feijóo, threaded from the whipped against foreigners in Torre Pacheco, assumed as the speech of the ultra -right over immigration and in which the Prosecutor's Office requested almost four years in prison for Ayuso's boyfriend for tax fraud.
After a month of June Horribilis for the Socialists, after the devastating UCO report on Santos Cerdán and its subsequent entry into prison, the wind now blows in another direction. And, although the government knows that it will not be the political beneficiary of all this, it does believe that “it puts the electorate in front of the usual PP: that of the Patriotic Police, the Patriotic Treasury and the structural corruption.”
And, although the facts that are investigated correspond to periods prior to the national leadership of Feijóo, in the PSOE they insist that the PP has not changed anything, among other issues, because its leader “not only has nothing changed from the corrupt past of his party, but also exhibits and claims with impudice to Aznar and Rajoy, whose ministers have passed by prison in some cases, and in some cases, and in some cases they are accused ”. The last time he walked with pride to both former presidents was in the recent National Congress of the PP, where both Aznar and Rajoy were primed with “the corruption of the PSOE” and erected, without reco, in cleaning and integrity guarantors in politics.
“The leader of the PP is now a victim of his infamous strategy to convert corruption into the axis on which he pivots the public conversation,” they say from Moncloa. Indeed, corruption has been placed as a second problem in Spain in the last CIS survey after the outbreak of the Cerdán case and the plot of bites in exchange for public works that the former secretary of Organization allegedly led and in Commanda with the former Minister of Transportation, José Luis Ábalos. The concern of the Spaniards has reached this month their record of recent years with 25.3%, levels that were not reflected since 2019. Between June and July it has experienced a rise of 13.6 points.
Feijóo is, in the opinion of a socialist minister, “a leader without criteria who has been unable to blur and a new account with the past of his party since he arrived in Genoa” that, in addition, “has as its starting point of his political life friendship with a drug trafficker.” Who speaks does not remain gravity to the Ábalos/Cerdán scandal and the damage that the case has caused in the PSOE and in the government, but it does relativizes it to the information about the plot of Montoro.
Another member of the Sánchez government prefers to focus on the different ways of reacting to corruption cases between the PP and the PSOE. And Feijóo's silence stands out in the hours after the summary of the summary against Sánchez's immediate reaction with the expulsion of Cerdán from the PSOE, followed by his subsequent appearance in the Congress of Deputies. The leader of the PP, who has avoided making statements about the matter, has limited himself to writing in X that his criteria on corruption “is very clear and does not change regardless of who affects” and that he will not speak “neither of persecution of the judges nor of pseudo media. What must be investigated, to investigate.” Not a mention to Montoro. In fact, for his closest environment the accused has gone from being the strong man of the Finance of the governments of José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy to be someone who “was a minister seven years ago and who has no employment relationship with the Feijóo team.”
A scandal that benefits Vox
While The National Directorate of the PP tries to disconnect from a case that arrives in full offensive of Feijóo and his team against the corruption of the PSOE In the surroundings of Sánchez, some are recreated in the events that have put in check the strategy of the popular and others contain breathing waiting for new UCO reports on the Socialists. All agree, that yes, that if someone benefits the memory dose on the structural corruption of the PP that has meant the imputation of the former Minister of Finance is not the PSOE, but to the ultra -right of Vox. There are those in this sense from the government are convinced that if the legislature comes to the term “Vox will give sorpasso to the PP”.
Meanwhile, the Socialists demand from Feijóo to face, offer explanations and “ask for forgiveness for all the damage that has been produced, as the Socialist Party has done” with the alleged participation of his former Secretary of Organization Santos Cerdán in a corrupt plot. “Mr. Feijóo now does not know Mr. Montoro. See him to believe it,” Vice President María Jesús Montero came to ironize this Friday in relation to the response of some PP leaders about the matter that affects some people who, in his words, “are people who are active, or who have been active, in the PP, or in the immediate vicinity” of that party.
Montero referred to Feijóo's decision to incorporate his team of advisors two years ago to the Hard Core of Montoro to incorporate what he considered “all the talent that this party has” and that was largely resident in “Group of Secretaries of State of the governments of Mariano Rajoy,” as detailed from the National Directorate of the PP. Among the most prominent names was that of also accused Miguel Ferre, who was Secretary of State for Finance between 2012 and 2016 and before was in the permanent representation of Spain before the European Union (reper) and the Ecofin, and is currently a majority partner of the consultant Kreab Spain. A name that the PP now tries to separate at all costs by saying that it was part, like many others, of those who collaborated with Feijóo in the writing of reports.
