And Madrid grew in the southwest. In 20 years, the population of Arroyomolinos multiplied by seven. Between the beginning of the decade and 2021, single-family homes lined up in a dormitory city where there was only one town before. Located between two highways, the enclave became a solution for many young families who could not access a townhouse closer to the capital. Available land, rapid growth. Business opportunities. To place a political framework on the phenomenon there would be the Popular Party of the Community of Madrid. Arroyomolinos currently has 34,000 inhabitants and, since July, has had its second consecutive mayor on the way to the bench for corruption.
On July 15, a judge from Navalcarnero prosecuted Luis Quiroga, councilor of Arroyomolinos since June 2023. The judge ruled on the end of the investigation and proposed trying Quiroga, who had come to office after Ana Millán, her predecessor, finally decided to dedicate herself body and soul to regional politics, as vice-secretary of Organization of the Madrid PP and vice-president of the Assembly. from Madrid. Millán arrived at these positions with the help of her friend Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who has decidedly opted for her despite the accusation of four crimes of corruption.
Both cases, that of Quiroga and that of Ana Millán, reserve a privileged space for the issue of housing. The investigation into Ayuso's current 'number three' of the party began with the discovery of some emails in 2015, when Ciudadanos removed the PP from power. In three garbage bags that the outgoing team intended to get rid of there was a copy of an email in which Ana Millán claimed pending payments from a certain “Paco.” He turned out to be Francisco Roselló, a businessman who had received a total of 660,915.21 euros in contracts from the Department. Over time, the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard would establish that Roselló paid almost double the market price for the rental of a penthouse owned by Millán in the center of Arroyomolinos.
The civil guards, first, the Prosecutor's Office later, and finally the judges who had the case suspect that it was a method to launder a bribe in exchange for awards from the Youth Department. They later discovered that Roselló had hired the mayor's husband and sister. A judge from Navalcarnero considers that she gathers evidence against Millán of influence peddling, bribery, prevarication and fraud against the Administration.
Ana Millán was charged in 2022, but that was not an obstacle to her promotion in the Madrid PP. Isabel Díaz Ayuso made her deputy secretary of Territorial Organization with functions such as interviewing all the PP candidates in the different Madrid towns before the elections to make sure that they would not have problems with the justice system. Millán also occupied a high position on the lists, which guaranteed her becoming a regional representative.
Millán is waiting for the last judge to arrive at the Navalcarnero Investigative Court to carry out the pending proceedings, including the testimony of the PP leader's husband as a witness, and submit, if she follows the criteria of her predecessor, a reasoned statement asking the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid to investigate Millán, given her status as a judge.
Judge Sandra García González has just requested an extension for the case in which she complains about the workload of the Navalcarnero court, as it deals with civil and criminal matters. Millán does not want to wait that long and has just requested that the case against her be filed even before her husband testifies.
The successor, on the way to the bench
Ana Millán left one of her top collaborators, Luis Ortega, at the head of the Arroyomolinos City Council. Ortega had been number two on his list and had carried out notable tasks in the past. Among them, presiding over the Arroyomolinos Municipal Services Management Company (Emugesa), in charge of land and housing policy in the municipality, which has multiplied its inhabitants sevenfold so far this century.
Judge María Leticia García Clérigo believes that there is sufficient evidence that Luis Ortega modified the minutes of a session of the public company, held on September 26, 2019, to record that the then Secretary of the Council, Ignacio Rodríguez de la Riva, had been dismissed, and María Isabel Santamaría Alonso had been appointed, to whom the position of deputy to the Presidency would also have been added. In her order, the judge points out the possible commission of the crimes of forgery in a commercial document and prevarication in a medial bankruptcy with a crime of embezzlement.
In reality, none of that happened at the Board, as demonstrated by the recordings made by De la Riva, the outgoing secretary and complainant of the events. The judge considers that the mayor of Arroyomolinos and María Isabel Santamaría Alonso, appointed secretary of the Board of Directors of the public company, have evidence of the crimes of prevarication, falsification of commercial documents and embezzlement.
The magistrate reached this conclusion after the Civil Guard validated the recording of the meeting made by the plaintiff, after several witnesses gave statements in court and various documentation was collected from Emugesa, such as payments to the accused as deputy to the presidency in a position that was never proposed or approved by the board of directors.
The news of the order ending the investigation and moving to an abbreviated procedure, the equivalent of prosecution for this type of crimes, motivated Quiroga's reaction, who decided to use the City Council's website to publish a statement and correct the press headlines: “The mayor of Arroyomolinos is not aware that the Court has issued an order of indictment. There is only one order, sent to the parties on July 23, in which it is agreed the continuation of the procedure through the procedures of the abbreviated procedure.”
In that statement, Quiroga assures that the complaint that gave rise to the case “responds solely to the desire for personal and political revenge” against him by the worker dismissed in 2020. Despite the progress in the judicial investigation, which places him one step away from the bench, the mayor of Arroyomolinos refers to “an exclusively administrative matter” and states that his defense has requested the file.
Ignacio García de la Riva, the complainant, acts as a private prosecutor and has presented a document of provisional conclusions in which he requests 7 years in prison for the current councilor of Arroyomolinos for the crimes of administrative prevarication and misappropriation of public funds. The indictment of the Prosecutor's Office remains to be known.