The previous season ended on a high: 350 million euros wasted on a megalomaniac project that was going to be used to build a dozen public buildings signed by the best architects on the planet and of which only one was completed, the Institute of Legal Medicine. Five senior officials of the Government who gave birth to the idea were sentenced to prison terms, accused of prevaricating and embezzling public funds in 24 contracts between 2005 and 2011. The former Minister of Justice and Vice President, Alfredo Prada, received seven years in the National Court. Other public officials of the time have appealed to the Supreme Court to avoid going to jail. The boss of everything, Esperanza Aguirre, president of Madrid with an absolute majority and full powers from 2003 to 2012, the same leader who had traveled from New York to Singapore and other capitals to exhibit the models (presented up to 72 times) was free again: she told the court that nothing about the City of Justice had been her idea and that her mistake was accepting the suggestion of her advisor and vice president for a time, Prada.
As with his other two right-hand men who went through prison, Ignacio González and Francisco Granados, Aguirre did not have much to do with the star project of his Government. This is how history has been written in the courts.
This Thursday the City of Justice premiered the sequel. It has been a year and a month after the ruling of the National Court that condemned five high-ranking officials of the aguirriismo, but above all it sentenced a way of doing politics and that ode to waste. The judges concluded that the promoters of the Campus of Justice “obviously ignored all economic forecasts, dispensed with any cost study, evaded administrative controls” and “moved further and further away from the corporate purpose” in the successive contracts they awarded for six years in a row in two consecutive governments.
In the second season, Isabel Díaz Ayuso and her institutional entourage, which included the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, the senior prosecutor, Almudena Lastra, bar associations, attorneys and other PP officials, returned this Thursday to the scene of the crime. The gigantic wasteland in Valdebebas, northern Madrid, is still there: between the Ifema fairgrounds and the Barajas airport, near where the controversial Zendal hospital was built, the one that was going to “surprise the world” and that today has no operating rooms and hardly any patients.
The press release from the Community of Madrid announced the expedition to the City of Justice as follows: “The president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, visits the Madrid neighborhood of Valdebebas to begin construction work on the City of Justice in Madrid, which will be the largest judicial complex in the world and where the 26 headquarters dispersed in the capital will be unified.”
There are no longer plans by Norman Foster or Zaha Hadid, as in the original project that Esperanza Aguirre presented to the world (what need would New Yorkers have to know what the Provincial Court of Madrid was going to look like?), but the megalomania of the project remains two decades later. “The largest, the most digitalized and the most accessible in the world,” the spokesperson for the Government of Madrid, Miguel Ángel García Martín, defined it as the opening act.
When asked the day before what controls are going to be established so that this time the project does not cause another hole of hundreds of millions in the public accounts and is a clean process, García Martín threw out the ball and appealed to future savings in rents, which amounted to 120 million euros (it is assumed that in many years, but neither how many nor for what concepts was detailed).
At the event inside a tent in the middle of nowhere, no one dared to mention former counselor Pradas, who was at a similar ceremony 17 years ago, nor the rest of the senior officials of those PP governments that are still pending appeals in the Supreme Court to avoid going to prison. At this point, the one who was vice president of the Community of Madrid, like Ignacio González, like Granados, like López Viejo and like so many others, are now just old memories in the albums of the absolute majorities of the same PP of Madrid that repeats daily that Sánchez's is the most corrupt Government in democracy.
They were not in the literal sense of the speeches, but the ghosts of that not-so-distant past in Ayuso's in-laws flew over during the institutional visit to restart the works. On the same site where only the Institute of Forensic Medicine has been built in twenty years, with its gigantic donut shape, several hundred million euros evaporated long before the first earth was moved. Even after the pharaonic work was suspended in 2008, a contract of more than ten million euros was paid to Norman Foster's studio, even though he failed to place a single brick on the esplanade.
Then, on January 31, 2007, when the press was also called to lay the first stone, Aguirre did the honors: “Today the construction of the Madrid Justice Campus begins, which as you know will host the largest concentration of judicial bodies, I was going to say in all of Spain, here (in the speech) it is written about all of Europe and the president of the Supreme Court has said about the entire world, therefore, we are not going to be left behind.”
Seventeen years after that, in Valdebebas there is no trace of the aguirriismo, but her pupil, former social media manager and now president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, assured from the same place: “Today is a very important day for the Community of Madrid and for Justice in Spain. On these lands, here in Valdebebas, the City of Justice is going to be built, the largest judicial complex in the world, one of the works largest public building in our country with an investment that will exceed 753 million euros (…) It will occupy 471,000 square meters in 2029, which will be the year in which the works are completed. It will be four times larger than the Court of Justice of Paris, to give you an example.”
Neither she nor her government spokesperson made a single mention of their predecessors in the PP or the governments that bought those plots. Not even when the only building in operation was mentioned, the Institute of Legal Medicine, which could be seen there in the background. Ayuso alluded to him as if he had grown alone among the weeds. As in so many other episodes, the past does not exist in the PP or in the Community of Madrid.
What is now being launched with the City of Justice – it is no longer called Campus as in the original project – is the fourth attempt to build a large complex to unify the judicial headquarters of Madrid, scattered in around thirty buildings throughout the city.
The operation behind Esperanza Aguirre's bizarre project was based on brick: it consisted of selling all those headquarters to finance the works of its star architects who would build circular buildings. The bubble burst… and the rest of the excesses were written in another sentence for corruption in the National Court. Aguirre's political heir, Ignacio González, presented his own plan in 2015, but it was shelved with the arrival of Cristina Cifuentes at Puerta del Sol. The one that started this Thursday is the second attempt by Isabel Díaz Ayuso, after the first contest was deserted. His first idea, shortly after reaching the Government, proposed a 35-year concession and an annual fee that was going to be paid to the winning company: 1,750 million euros, in total for constructing the buildings. The works were going to start in 2022 and some headquarters would be ready in 2025, as announced by the then Minister of Justice, Enrique López.
It happens that López is now retired from politics and the plot has not moved a stone since then. So the new formula opts for a direct allocation of building lots by the Community to a conglomerate of construction companies. The budget is 653 million euros to build “the largest courthouse in the world, 26 judicial headquarters in 470,000 square meters” and for everything to be completed in 2031, 27 years after being conceived for the first time. Acciona and ACS will build the main lot of buildings, while OHLA, Azvi and Rover will undertake the other phase.
This Thursday there was no first stone, but there was some earthwork with two prop excavators that started just when someone gave the order so that the cameras could record. On the first day, an oak was planted, according to the spokesperson for the Ayuso Government, “the tree that represents strength, righteousness, wisdom and the vocation for permanence of Justice, its deep roots evoke the deep roots in the democratic principles that we gave ourselves in the 1978 Constitution that now more than ever we have to defend and its open branches symbolize the right of all to effective judicial protection and reminds us that all “We are equal before the law.”
If this time the tree and the macro complex go ahead, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid, the Provincial Court (Civil and Criminal sections), the Prosecutor's Office, access to the guard courts, as well as archives, warehouses and security units will be located in that northern area of the capital. Together with them, and the Institute of Legal Medicine, the only one that went from models to cement in the failed Esperanza Aguirre project, a gigantic public parking lot with 2,900 spaces and another with almost 500 for justice personnel and lawyers will be built.
The maximum period to have the works completed is 48 months. Autumn 2029. A quarter of a century and more than 1,000 million euros after it was conceived by the Esperanza Aguirre Government. Unless The City of Justice, with its corruption, its imprisoned politicians, its star architects and the hundreds of millions of euros lost along the way, still has a third season.