{"id":140974,"date":"2026-07-05T20:14:12","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T20:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/140974\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T20:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T20:14:12","slug":"pedro-sanchez-tells-congress-i-never-knew-of-nor-would-i-have-tolerated-any-of-these-practices-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/140974\/","title":{"rendered":"Pedro S\u00e1nchez tells Congress: ‘I never knew of, nor would I have tolerated, any of these practices’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pedro S\u00e1nchez tells Congress: ‘I never knew of, nor would I have tolerated, any of these practices’<\/p>\n

Spain’s prime minister appeared before the Congress of Deputies on Wednesday to address the wave of corruption cases surrounding his government, party and family.<\/p>\n

“I am fully aware that public debate has been flooded with judicial news,” Pedro S\u00e1nchez said at the opening of his address, after briefly reviewing the latest European Council meeting and before turning to the core of his speech: the court cases involving the PSOE<\/a>, his partner Bego\u00f1a G\u00f3mez, and his brother David S\u00e1nchez. “I do not downplay their importance in the slightest \u2014 they are essential to understanding what is happening in our country beyond the judicial sphere.”<\/p>\n

“It is worth bearing in mind that behind this string of leaks there are political actors who are trying to conflate issues in order to confuse people,” S\u00e1nchez added, as he set out a timeline of the Koldo case following this week’s Supreme Court rulings against Jos\u00e9 Luis \u00c1balos, V\u00edctor de Aldama and Koldo Garc\u00eda.<\/p>\n

“These are rulings that the government respects and will comply with, as it must. In this country \u2014 the great democracy that it is \u2014 there must be no impunity for corrupt individuals, whoever they may be,” he said.<\/p>\n

“The PSOE has not been irregularly financed,” he continued. “It is others who have exploited its resources. We do not accept that corruption is inherent to human organisations.”<\/p>\n

Neither S\u00e1nchez nor any of his ministers made statements to the journalists crowding the corridors of the lower house. The prime minister entered the chamber accompanied by deputy prime minister Carlos Cuerpo.<\/p>\n

On Plus Ultra, Zapatero and his family<\/p>\n

“It falls solely to the government to clarify whether there was preferential treatment for the airline Plus Ultra \u2014 and the answer is unequivocal: there was not,” S\u00e1nchez told MPs, before defending former prime minister Jos\u00e9 Luis Rodr\u00edguez Zapatero, arguing his government had not produced a single corruption case. “No one can yet draw conclusions, and the government has nothing to hide.”<\/p>\n

“The question is not how long we are going to carry on \u2014 the question is: how could we not carry on?” S\u00e1nchez said rhetorically, drawing applause from the Socialist benches but a noticeably more muted response from his coalition partners in Sumar.<\/p>\n

The prime minister also devoted part of his 32-minute address to the influence-peddling cases involving Bego\u00f1a G\u00f3mez and his brother David S\u00e1nchez. “It is not easy for me to talk about them \u2014 because they affect the people I love most, and because I know, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that they are built on unfounded accusations and a pattern of harassment similar to what we have seen deployed in other Western countries,” he said.<\/p>\n

Junts calls on S\u00e1nchez to step aside<\/p>\n

The pressure on S\u00e1nchez intensified further on Wednesday as Junts, the Catalan pro-independence party whose seven MPs were instrumental in securing his return to power in 2023, called on the prime minister to resign and allow another Socialist leader to take over the government. The move marks a significant shift for a party that had previously supported S\u00e1nchez’s investiture, and raises fresh questions about the stability of his parliamentary coalition.<\/p>\n

Alberto N\u00fa\u00f1ez Feij\u00f3o: “You bear all the political responsibility”<\/p>\n

The leader of the conservative opposition used his 15 minutes to portray S\u00e1nchez as the epicentre of the scandals engulfing his party and family \u2014 what the People’s Party leader called the “corrupting political nexus.”<\/p>\n

“How can we not carry on?” Feij\u00f3o retorted sarcastically, departing from his prepared remarks to pick up on the prime minister’s rhetorical question. “How can we not carry on committing crimes \u2014 is what you mean.”<\/p>\n

Feij\u00f3o noted that the speech underpinning Spain’s first successful motion of no confidence \u2014 which centred on corruption \u2014 was delivered by Jos\u00e9 Luis \u00c1balos himself, sentenced on Tuesday to 24 years in prison<\/a>. “You bear all the political responsibility,” he said.<\/p>\n

The PP leader, the leading opposition figure since the fall of Pablo Casado, alternated hard judicial data \u2014 “You arrived here with 15 court cases on your shoulders; two already sentenced by the Supreme Court,” he said, referencing the conviction of the former attorney general \u2014 with more colourful language, invoking “orgies, bribes, jewels” and what he called a trail leading “from the sauna to the sewers.”<\/p>\n

“As far as I’m concerned, we would be tabling a motion of no confidence today,” Feij\u00f3o declared \u2014 though to succeed he would need the right-leaning nationalist parties, the Basque Nationalist Party and Junts, to switch sides, something that despite their threats has not materialised.<\/p>\n

This story is being updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pedro S\u00e1nchez tells Congress: ‘I never knew of, nor would I have tolerated, any of these practices’ Spain’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140975,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[129],"tags":[17433,63711,30186,24367,383,304,381,44268],"class_list":["post-140974","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pedro-sanchez","tag-begona-gomez","tag-congress-of-deputies","tag-corruption-case","tag-david-sanchez","tag-government","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-prime-minister","tag-zapatero"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116869205994314670","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140974","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=140974"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/140974\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140975"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140974"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=140974"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=140974"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}