{"id":544725,"date":"2025-11-02T18:58:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T18:58:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/544725\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T18:58:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T18:58:20","slug":"spain-sits-on-the-bench","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/544725\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain sits on the bench"},"content":{"rendered":"

1.<\/strong> This is a crucial Monday, from a legal standpoint. Spain will experience a political upheaval that will be discussed for some time. Both the PP, led by Maz\u00f3n and Ayuso, and the PSOE, led by Pedro S\u00e1nchez, have a lot at stake. S\u00e1nchez will face a pivotal day with the Attorney General in the dock. In Valencia, Maribel Vilaplana, as a witness, will hold the key to clarifying, minute by minute, what happened at El Ventorro, outside the restaurant and in the parking lot where Carles Maz\u00f3n allegedly accompanied her after a feast for which we haven’t seen the bill. The journalist, who as a witness cannot lie, should today reveal all the details of Maz\u00f3n’s silence, regarding those 40 minutes in which the President of the Valencian Generalitat didn’t check his phone and didn’t answer the calls from his Minister of Emergencies, who was calling him repeatedly. The same week as the state funeral for the 229 people who died in Valencia, we learned that Salom\u00e9 Pradas was aware, from 1:56 p.m., that the greatest danger would come from the Poio ravine. The irresponsibility of not doing enough to warn people when necessary should not only force Maz\u00f3n to resign, even if it’s a year later, even if it’s only because the cries of the victims’ families have moved him, but should also make him pay for his actions in court. He could have prevented many deaths and was, so to speak, idly by. The fact that he hasn’t even been charged is outrageous. <\/p>\n

2.<\/strong> This Monday in Madrid, another unusual sight will unfold. For the first time, a state attorney general will sit as a defendant in a trial. \u00c1lvaro Garc\u00eda Ortiz is accused of revealing secrets. The preliminary investigation, based on the Civil Guard’s inquiries, concludes that he was the one who leaked an email from Alberto Gonz\u00e1lez Amador, the partner of the president of the Community of Madrid, to the press. In that email, the businessman admitted to committing two tax frauds, totaling 350,000 euros, and offered a plea bargain to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office. In other words, D\u00edaz Ayuso’s partner confessed to being a tax evader and negotiated a reduced sentence. But while Gonz\u00e1lez Amador still has time to pay for his admitted fraud, it is the prosecutor who faces a six-year prison sentence. The trial begins this Monday in the Supreme Court. The most surprising aspect of the case is that he is being accused without any evidence. No one has found the alleged email that Garc\u00eda Ortiz supposedly passed on to SER radio and other sources. Eldiario.esIf the prosecutor succeeds, it will be one for Ayuso and another match ball saved for Pedro S\u00e1nchez. <\/p>\n

3.<\/strong> Meanwhile, Jos\u00e9 Luis \u00c1balos remains a member of Congress, is being called to testify in the cases that implicate him, and, unlike Santos Cerd\u00e1n, is not going to prison. There are only two possible explanations for his continued freedom: either the evidence is much weaker than the leads the Civil Guard believed they had gathered through their investigations, or \u00c1balos\u2014and Koldo as well\u2014is making a deal with the Prosecutor’s Office to save himself, more or less, in exchange for helping to uncover the truth. \u00c1balos’s wife already explained it on television: knowing him, he won’t go down alone. To significantly reduce his own sentence, will \u00c1balos talk? For the moment, in the Senate circus, Pedro S\u00e1nchez denied the party’s irregular financing but admitted that he has, on occasion, received cash, always less than a thousand euros and with receipts, for personal expenses. The details of the envelopes and cash payments went largely unnoticed because the press chose to focus on the new pair of glasses the Spanish Prime Minister was sporting. It’s the whole finger-and-moon thing. And the media, and part of the opposition, fell for it hook, line, and sinker. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. This is a crucial Monday, from a legal standpoint. Spain will experience a political upheaval that will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":544726,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[175115,2000,299,175114,104,5598],"class_list":{"0":"post-544725","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-bench","9":"tag-eu","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-sits","12":"tag-spain","13":"tag-the"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115481641132289432","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/544726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}