Spain’s
kickback culture on trial
Court
case involves the PM’s party, millions of euros and a man nicknamed
Don Vito.
By DIEGO TORRES
10/17/16, 5:29 AM CET Updated 10/18/16, 6:37 PM CET
MADRID — Spain’s
national criminal court, the Audiencia Nacional, is a busy place
these days, as it hosts around 300 witnesses and 37 defendants, many
of them key figures in Mariano Rajoy’s Popular Party, charged with
fixing public tenders worth over €350 million.
The result of nearly
nine years of investigations, the trial in the “Gürtel case”
began this month and will last for months. So big that it’s been
divided into two parts, it has the scale, ambition and shock value of
The Godfather, plus an alleged gang leader, Francisco Correa, who
prided himself on the nickname Don Vito after Marlon Brando’s
character in Coppola’s classic. (Gürtel was the codename given to
the investigation. It means “strap” in German, and the Spanish
word for strap is correa.)
Far from being
fiction, however, the case reveals venal habits among politicians
that fueled the Spanish construction bubble and subsequent depression
that pushed unemployment over 25 percent. It’s the first in a
series of macro trials that will examine corruption in the boom
years, tainting not just the PP but their Socialist rivals, a
pro-independence Catalan party, and others.
One defendant is
Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of Rajoy’s PP, accused of stashing
€48 million in Swiss bank accounts. The investigation describes a
scheme of kickbacks in cash, prostitutes or gifts from real-estate
developers, construction firms and other businesses in exchange for
public contracts between 1999 and 2005. The court will hear that this
structure illegally financed the PP, funding campaigns and extra
undeclared wages for party leaders.
By 2006, Spain was
building more than 750,000 houses a year, more than Germany, the
U.K., France and Italy combined.
Giving testimony in
court, Correa recounted: “In 1996, Luis Bárcenas told me: ‘You
have contact with businessmen and I have contact with politicians.
We’re going to try and do it so that when there are public tenders
we favor businessmen that can later collaborate with the party.’”
“I spent day and
night in Génova [the PP’s headquarters in Madrid]. I spent more
time there than in my office. It felt like home,” Correa said in
another part of his testimony.
Criminal motives
Corruption is key to
understanding the policy decisions that led to Spain’s ill-fated
real estate and infrastructure boom, said Luis Garicano, a professor
at the London School of Economics and the leading economic voice of
centrist party Ciudadanos.
By 2006, Spain was
building more than 750,000 houses a year, more than Germany, the
U.K., France and Italy combined. Construction accounted for nearly 16
percent of GDP in 2007, compared with around 9 percent in its biggest
European peers. Nearly a quarter of the jobs created in the country
between 1996 and 2007 were in the construction sector.
“This can’t be
explained without the kickbacks,” said Garicano, who believes that
only Italy’s Tangentopoli scandal in the 1990s can compare with the
corruption of Spain’s boom times.
“There were
mistakes and there were also criminal motives guiding part of the
economic policy being implemented,” said Nacho Álvarez, economic
policy spokesman for the far-left Podemos.
A complex series of
factors inflated the bubble. Much of the cheap euro credit flooding
into the country was handled by loosely regulated public financial
institutions called cajas which were directly managed by politicians.
Local officials had huge and arbitrary powers over urban planning,
while real estate played a key role in funding local governments.
There were major tax incentives for buying homes, as opposed to
rentals, and the economy was awash with cash.
“You’ve got a
criminal triangle among politicians, who provide permits; the cajas,
controlled by politicians, which finance operations; and the
construction companies, which pay kickbacks and do the work,”
summarized Garicano.
Grand scale
“These trials are
the terrible climax of the real-estate bubble and what was a true
culture of pelotazo (making money fast) in our country,” said
Álvarez of Podemos.
Such policies
flourished under the auspices of flawed legal and political systems
that made Spain more vulnerable to corruption than most of its
European peers. Víctor Lapuente, a lecturer at the University of
Gothenburg who has done extensive research into the subject, said
Spain had little of the petty corruption often associated with
developing countries, such as bribing police, but plenty of “grand
corruption” such as that revealed in the Gürtel case.
“During many
years, we’ve seen a culture of impunity and a series of excesses
that would have been unthinkable in many other countries” —
Víctor Lapuente, lecturer at the University of Gothenburg
“During many
years, we’ve seen a culture of impunity and a series of excesses
that would have been unthinkable in many other countries,” Lapuente
said, adding that foreign colleagues often can’t believe the
enormous amount of money involved in Spanish corruption cases.
The two main causes,
he said, were the extreme politicization of local government where
mayors wield big decision-making power and aren’t checked by a
merit-based bureaucracy; and a lack of transparency in public
contracts at all levels of government.
For Eva Belmonte, a
journalist working for Civio, a pro-transparency NGO, there has been
surprisingly little progress in terms of monitoring such corruption
since the kickbacks in the Gürtel case happened more than a decade
ago. “The regulation of public contracts has hardly been changed,”
she said, adding that the country still lacked a watchdog that could
effectively monitor public-sector contracts for the property and
construction sectors.
Other experts are
more optimistic that progress has been made. Garicano said the
mentality of ordinary citizens had changed, with less public
tolerance and greater consciousness of the cost of corruption for the
Spanish economy.
“The positive news
is that we have become shocked [by these trials] and this means that
we aren’t as tolerant of corruption as we may have thought,” said
Lapuente.
Authors:
Diego Torres
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário