Eloise Horsfield
AN IU party boss has spoken of his ‘shame’ after a report into the €647 million ERE scandal was spiked by the Junta.
Ignacio Garcia’s report, which took five months to compile, had firmly allotted the blame at the door of PSOE bosses Jose Antonio Vieira and Antonio Fernandez… but also partially blamed the PP party.
The fraud – the biggest public money scam in Spanish history – saw a regional development fund used to pay early retirement payments to 70 individuals, often for companies they had never even worked for.
However both PP and PSOE parties refused to accept the 200-page report, which included information from politicians and business leaders.
The PSOE party rejected 30 conclusions in the document and blamed the fiasco entirely on former employment boss, Francisco Javier Guerrero – who was working under Vieira and Fernandez.
Meanwhile the PP named the entire socialist administration as the culprits – including Junta boss Jose Antonio Grinan.
Garcia described the Junta’s refusal to approve the report as ‘tremendously disappointing’.
“We started out in the right direction but in the end we were frustrated by manoeuvring and strategies which led us nowhere” he said.
A judicial enquiry is also underway to decide who is criminally responsible for the fraud.
The Junta most probably scrapped the report because they were involved in the same scam and didn’t want to be exposed lol.
So those responsible can refuse to accept the reports findings and then what? The consequences disappear too?
No.
Oxfam Intermon released a report this week based on more than 30 years worth of data from the financial crises in South America and South Asia predicting that it could take Spain between 15-30 years to recover. By which time 40 per cent of the population will be living in poverty. A crises that those who engineered it deny they are even culpable for and yet still they are in office. I hope the judicial review makes better reading.
Democracy was always a sickly specimen in Spain but if the political class continues to make a mockery of it then it may expire.
“Democracy was always a sickly specimen in Spain”
The first free elections after Franco died were held in June 1977. That was just 35 years ago. In other words, Spain is still a young democracy.
Sorry but the word “always” does not belong in that sentence.
“The first free elections after Franco died were held in June 1977. That was just 35 years ago. In other words, Spain is still a young democracy.”
So what? You conflate young with transparent, open, robust, accountable. Democracy has been around for a long time and Spain could have used the opportunity to take the best from other countries and built a truly democratic system accountable to the electorate with a free unpoliticized judiciary.
But they did not.
Instead politicians decided the best template was simply more politicians in office, politicians in the judiciary, politicians on the boards of banks. Just more politicians everywhere. They simply dragged the template of the Juntas from the eighteenth century, polished it slightly added more elections and called it democracy. We have the least open democracy in the “West”, more politicians per head of the population than anyone else in Europe and an economy in tatters because of unchecked spending of money we don’t have on things we don’t need by democratically elected politicians. You build a strong democracy on strong foundations. That didn’t happen and still hasn’t. It may have been “new” but it was not “best”. “Young” should have meant better but democracy in Spain has always been less than it could have been.
You’d better stop nitpicking, Tony. lol.
I don’t think democracy comes into this story – think Mafia and crooks and the truth is not far away.
Ignacio should watch his back, an ‘unexplained’ accident could be heading his way..
Please could someone explain where the original ERE funds came from, was it financed by the Junta de Andalucia, Europe or central Government ?
Will, see: https://theolivepress.es/spain-news/2012/08/09/ere-fraud-investigation-reveals-175-missing-files/
It was EU funds in the main. Terrible that the people of Spain are at rock bottom whilst these gangsters dole out the funds that should havebeen used to fix the economy and help people. Spain is bent. Period.
Will, I´m unsure apart from one thing.
No programme ever receives 100% funding from the EU. In those days, the maximum EU cointribution would have been 50%, probably from the ERDF.
The rest of the financing would have been “matched funding”, provided by a variety of sources, but most likely by the Junta de Andalucía and/or central government.
But this is not to say that the EU was involved at all. I simply don´t know.