Laurence Dollimore
SPAIN’S Partido Popular advised its officials on how to break campaign spending rules without attracting attention.
A recently unearthed power-point presentation shows how the PP taught dozens of its mayors to exceed the legal limit without being discovered by the courts.
The document was created in 1999 during the suspected height of the Gurtel scandal, for which dozens of former officials are currently on trial.
Political parties have limits on how much they can spend on specific items during campaigns i.e. billboards, photos or adverts.
To exceed these limits, the PP urged its officials to divert donations to the ordinary party account as opposed to the official campaign account.
From there they were told to hide the expenses by changing the item bought on the bill from, for example, ‘billboard’ to non-campaign items like ‘desks’ or ‘fences’.
The document, entitled PP Campaign Finance, is a dozen pages long and was used in at least Madrid, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.
