BoT 549

 

Business over Tapas

A digest of this week's Spanish financial, political and social news aimed primarily at Foreign Property Owners:

Prepared by Lenox Napier.  Consultant: José Antonio Sierra

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August 1 2024            Nº 549

 

Editorial:

On Tuesday, the judge and some private accusers, including representatives from Vox, were able to visit and attempt to interview the President of Spain in the Official Residence, about the apparent improprieties of the President’s wife.

Pedro Sánchez stood on his legal rights to not declare to the judge.

Imagine the scene. Imagine the image. Imagine the fallout. Imagine the jubilation of the far-right at this extraordinary – and defamatory – turn of events.

Smiling for the cameras, the Vox lawyer present at the brief event said afterwards: "The President was both impassive and arrogant".

The Manos Limpias, usually described as an ‘ultra’ pseudo-syndicate, is the group behind the complaints against the President of Spain’s wife Begoña Gómez, for various causes of corruption as described (invented) in far-right news-sites and collected and presented by the group to an eccentric judge who has consequently spent the last few months on a fishing expedition to try and find something against his victim and – who knows – bring about the fall of the Government and the glorious revival of the conservatives (and their fascist allies).

The day after the denuncia back in April, Manos Limpias said ‘It will now be up to the judge to determine whether the news reports are true or not’.

All this, despite a 160 page study by the UCO (serious crimes unit of the Guardia Civil) showing that there was no case to answer.

The judge is Juan Carlos Peinado, described as ‘the head of the 41st court in Madrid. His daughter, Patricia Peinado, is a councillor for the PP in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid)’.

‘Is there anything normal in this witch-hunt?’ asks Ignacio Escolar in his weekly editorial.

‘No’, he answers himself.

All good fun, and sorry for my excitable tone.

Now the Clean Hands people – well, it’s just Miguel Bernad and his lawyers (…and bankers and political friends) have made another denuncia against the socialist hoards – in this case a complaint against the PSOE, ERC and Junts for using the term ‘Lawfare’ to describe political acts by the judiciary disguised as jurisprudence.

The Supreme Court says that the term, as used against several judges mentioned by name, may be considered as ‘a lack of respect’ but not as a threat. (The Supreme Court practically admitting here that ‘Lawfare’ is a thing).

Miguel Bernad, by the way, was named Knight of Honour by the Francisco Franco National Foundation for his "services in defence of the ideals of the Movement" in December 2011.

Manos Limpias was founded in 1995 and quickly began to make complaints against any left-wing agency or person until in 2006 the Supreme Court accused it of the crimes of repeated false accusations. The agency has also made complaints against same-sex marriages, the prime minister of Gibraltar, various politicians and left-wing judges.

The agency is accused of making denuncias, and then searching for a pecuniary solution – Miguel and the president of Ausbanc, Luis Pineda, narrowly avoided going to prison in 2021 for this impropriety (they were absolved in 2024 by another court).  

Wiki tells us that ‘With more than 6,000 members, Manos Limpias neither presents accounts nor holds meetings as required by its statutes. The Barcelona Court maintains that "it seems that the activity of this union is none other than filing complaints".

Most of their complaints over the years were later discarded by the Supreme Court and other lower courts, including the Pablo Iglesias PISA invention in 2016, the frustrated trial against Princess Cristina in 2017 and their complaint against a satirical magazine called Mongolia for a particularly tasteless cover in January this year.

A comment describes the Manos Limpias as ‘white-collar delinquents with dirty hands’, well, maybe so, but they will continue to seek to wound Spain’s progress and international reputation for some time to come.

…...

Housing:

 

Público looks at ‘The impact of speculation and vulture funds on the current wave of evictions’.  It says ‘Seven out of ten evictions between January and March of this year were down to the price of the rent, which is equivalent to 5,443 cases, 12% more than in the same period in 2023’. The article notes that ‘…Real estate speculation plays a crucial role in the rise in rental prices. Large investors buy properties hoping that their values ​​will rise, artificially inflating prices. But they are not alone in this game. Vulture funds, large financial institutions that acquire huge amounts of properties at very low prices, to then sell them at exorbitant prices, are the main culprits of this problem…’ The article ends with ‘…Rents have risen by more than 66% over the past ten years, while wages have only increased by 3.4% in all this time, according to a report’.

There’s a shortage of rental properties in Spain. Scarcity means price-hikes. The Corner reports here, ‘The price of rents has risen by 9% and reached highs in June, up to €12.65 per square meter, according to data from Fotocasa, which has specified that a home of 80 square meters already costs €1,012 per month...’

From El Economista (thanks to Aethicus property lawyers) here. ‘The "most serious crisis in the last fifty years": the rental offer has been reduced by a third and demand is growing at an unusual rate’.

Rental prices are not only affected negatively by the large number of short-term tourist apartments, but also – at least in neighbouring Portugal, by the digital nomads, who are evidently used to paying higher rents says Xataca here.

…...

Tourism:

An interesting history of Spanish tourism is at elDiario.es here – the vast amount of money coming in (13% of GDP and 20% of jobs) versus the botheration (known as turismofobia). The first group that warned against the threats brought by foreign tourists was of course The Church. As recently as 1970, the editor of the magazine Diez Minutos narrowly escaped prison for featuring the photograph of a woman in a bikini. But Spain was prospering. One must thank Manuel Fraga de Irribarne, the Minister of Tourism (1962 – 1969), for opening the gates to mass tourism, and a change in consequence of the Spanish view on life.

As for today, with Spain on the cusp of overtaking France as the country with the most visitors, with two international tourists for every Spaniard, the question arises – how much botheration can we take? From CNN here: ‘A point of no return:’ Why Europe has become an epicentre for anti-tourism protests this summer’.

El País runs a piece on the massification of tourism in Spain, under the title: ‘Tourism has a price’. It says: ‘The great engine of the Spanish economy has burst at its seams. Between saturated beaches and city centres packed with bars, many parts of its geography have become impossible spaces for daily life. If there really is a quality alternative to mass tourism, no one has yet found the formula. We travel through the most crowded postcards of Mallorca, Málaga and Barcelona to find the drawbacks to mass tourism’. “Damn right it’s crowded”, says a visitor from Germany, “but really it’s not so bad when you’re a tourist”.

From The Guardian here: ‘Extreme heat poses ‘real risk’ to Spain’s mass tourism industry. Public health adviser says higher temperatures caused by climate crisis pose danger for visitors not used to them’. Héctor Tejero, the head of health and climate change at Spain’s health ministry, says: “It’s a real risk because the big Spanish sol y playa tourist areas – the areas that are most dependent on tourism – are places where the impact of climate change is going to be greatest in Spain; places such as the south and the east of the peninsula – basically the Mediterranean coast. There’s a definite risk that the zones where there’s most tourism will become less habitable because of more heat-waves and much hotter nights”.

Sometimes, it’s hard to get it right. The Galician promotion for example – a nice photograph of the rolling wooded hills and the caption in English ‘It’s a match’. I wonder how much they paid for that particular gem.

From The Olive Press here: ‘Tourist accommodation site Booking.com fined a record €412m for ‘exploiting’ hotels in Spain and keeping out competitors’.

From the RTVE, a full and useful guide to the 3,551 beaches in Spain.

…...

Finance:

From elDiario.es here: ‘Spain reaches a new employment record with 434,000 more workers as unemployment falls to 11.27%. The labour market has reached a new peak, with 21.68 million employed people, and unemployment has fallen by 222,600 people’. The figures for the second quarter come from the Encuesta de Población Activa. Details of latest unemployment numbers by municipality or province on record at the EPA are here. Inflation is also down to 2.8% year-on-year (July figures).

…...

Politics:

On the recent losses in the parliamentary votes over the preamble to the 2025 budget and the arrangement to share the immigrant minors across all the regions, we read that ‘Junts de Catalunya had warned the PSOE that they would only support the Government in the vote if they received in turn the Catalonian presidency for Puigdemont’, says El Mundo here. One might think that the conservatives would be pleased that the Government didn’t buckle under this apparent threat. El Huff Post warns its readers that ‘Voting no to the spending ceiling does not suffocate the Government, it suffocates you’. It says: ‘In the headlines you will see that Junts will bring down the Government and the first step has been to vote NO to the spending ceiling in the last plenary session. It voted against together with the PP and Vox. This leaves the General State Budget for 2025 up in the air. It also voted together with PP and Vox against the reform of the immigration law…’ (With video).

Oddly, we doubt that Junts would prefer to see a national government of the PP and Vox.

The government was certainly surprised to lose the two votes and Feijóo quickly called for fresh elections.

Some of the PP ‘barones’ (regional leaders) are not in step with Feijóo over immigration says El Huff Post here. ‘They believe that Alberto Núñez Feijóo is wrong to align himself with Vox in its harsh anti-immigration discourse. In recent weeks, the leader of the PP has tried to make immigration a matter of special relevance and has even linked it on more than one occasion with crime…’ Of course, he needed to, to underline his party vote against the government’s plan to share out (mildly) some of los menas, the unaccompanied immigrant minors currently under care in Tenerife. From El País here: ‘Andalucía’s Moreno distances himself from Feijóo's harsh discourse: "I will not participate in the persecution against immigrants", he says’.

Oscar Puente, the Minister for Transport (and something of a character) is on record at elDiario.es here: “Judge Peinado’s instruction is a journey to nowhere; crude, miserable and a textbook nullity. The socialists accepted in the Transition pact that justice would not be done for the crimes of Francoism while the conservatives have not fulfilled the fundamental part that they assumed: that power does not belong to it by right, that it changes hands based on votes and that it must be respected”. Most of the rest of interview deals with the political activities of Junts de Catalunya (the party led by the exiled Carles Puigdemont).

Following the thwarted interrogation by Judge Peinado on Tuesday, Pedro Sánchez has filed suit against the Judge for malfeasance. The details from The Guardian here.

One is reminded once again of this call to arms from José María Aznar back in April: ‘"Whoever can speak, let him speak. Whoever can do, let him do. Whoever can contribute, let him contribute. Whoever can move, let him move. Whoever can try..." Aznar spoke directly and without a shadow of shame just after declaring Sánchez "a danger to Spanish democracy" with Feijóo sitting next to him’. In the end, it’s usually to do with the money.

The political year has finished (until August 27th) and Pedro Sánchez sums up the last twelve months at 20Minutos here.

…...

Catalonia:

From Catalan News here: There is a pre-agreement between ERC and Socialists to name Salvador Illa (PSE) as Catalan president’. Part of the deal is that Catalonia will control and supervise its own taxes from now on. The agreement to be ratified by the ERC party-members on Friday (there’s a similar system in operation in the Basque Country). Will Puigdemont show up for the investiture debate? He says he will.

…...

Europe:

Our favourite story this week comes via Jalopnik from the Greek island of Santorini, where the locals are told to stay inside by the elected municipal counsellor as 11,000 cruise ship tourists descend on the island. Wouldn’t want to clog up the streets with local folk inconveniencing the tourists, no.

From The Guardian here: ‘British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has discussed the possibility of a youth mobility scheme with the Spanish prime minister, according to reports. Pedro Sánchez is said to have put the proposal to Starmer in a private meeting during the European Political Community summit at Blenheim Palace in July. Recent years have seen growing calls for a scheme that would allow young people to live, study or work in the EU for a limited period…’

…...

Courts:

From elDiario.es here: ‘The PP mayor who considers the king “a weakling governed by a red” inaugurates a Spanish flag in the main square in Camuñas (Toledo). Fernando Gallego is a regular on social networks where before being mayor of Camuñas, and also once he assumed office, he has left numerous messages calling the Guardia Civil “fucking ticket-takers” (and Well Done the automatic Google translator!), Pedro Sánchez “a shit” or Núñez Feijóo “a clown” and “undercover nationalist”, as well as accusing several left-wing female politicians of “living off their sucking-skills”’ (with various examples on Twitter). Following this story (and a media interview with an approving citizen of Camuñas who later was identified as being the mayor himself), Gallego was sacked from the Partido Popular and remains, presumably, in his post as an independent.

Lawfare against the right? A rare fish indeed. It’s odd how there has never been an eccentric judge that went after an ultra on his own (the mayor mentioned above might be a suitable target for such a warrior). OK, there was one, Judge Baltazar Garzón (wiki), who took on Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet when that worthy was in England for medical reasons and who finally ended up being disbarred for his efforts in the Caso Gürtel.

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Media:

One of the most egregious of the fake-news champions is the far-right OKDiario. According to El Salto, the medium has received 1.27 million euros in institutional advertising from the Madrid region in the past four years. 

The Spanish extremist MEP Alvise Pérez has posted the video of an immigrant minor beating a woman with the comment – ‘the only good number of illegal immigrants is zero’. Mind you, the video (of a brother and sister fighting) was taken in Malaysia in 2022.

Miguel Charisteas (the Spanish equivalent of Jon Stewart) on YouTube here, explains the tactics behind the Begoña Gómez case (including the telling remark that the PP is hoping to remove Pedro Sánchez through the same door as the one taken by Antonio Costas over in Portugal).

‘For years, most of the Spanish autonomous communities have been holding back the development of digital radio technology (DAB+). This is a European radio industry standard that uses digital broadcast signals, without requiring the use of the Internet and with greater sound quality, efficiency and performance than analogue Frequency Modulation (FM). Despite the advantages of digitalisation of broadcasts, a dozen autonomous administrations prevent the entry of hundreds of new legal competitors into the Spanish radio market…’ Only the Baleares, Navarra and Catalonia allow the DAB+ System.

Why? To aid the main broadcasters (Cope, Onda Cero and La Ser), their advertisers and the propagandists (if you will). The story is at El Economista here. The system is available in modern Spanish cars, says El Debate here (I’ve got a cassette player in mine), but is generally underused by consumers.

Reading the news-stories sometimes means using a trick to get around the pay-wall. For newspapers like The Telegraph, The Times and El País, copy the code and paste it in the slot at Webpage Archive: https://archive.ph  That, or pay the subscription to read that article…

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Ecology:

‘Spain in pole position for green hydrogen race as EU approves massive state aid’ says EuroNews here. Indeed, Ecoticias talks of a vast strike of underground quantities of hydrogen and helium in Monzón (Huesca). ‘Spain to have energy for centuries to come’ says the headline. 

…...

Various:

From Sur in English here: ‘Madrid acknowledges 'traffic saturation' on Costa del Sol and commissions an urgent report to find solutions. The A-7 carries a high intensity of traffic, particularly on the section between Fuengirola and San Pedro Alcántara, where it exceeds 65,000 vehicles per day on average’.

José Aguirre, the president of the Andalusian Parliament, says that deputies, with a base salary of just 3,343 euros (14 payments), "are finding it difficult to make ends meet" and calls for a raise. Those readers who earn more than 3,300€ a month may feel for them, while those earning less may not be so charitable. In reality, the deputies do rather better, with salaries, allowances and expenses. Both reports come from Público.

The more tourist apartments there are, says Directa (en Catalán) here, the more the local residents lean towards the right-wing. Salou, Roses and other Costa Brava towns are examined.

A bar has closed for its hols, says El Huff Post here. The sign in the window reads: "Estamos de vacaciones hasta nuevo aviso. Un saludo. PD: Nunca abráis un puto bar" (‘by the way, my advice - never open a f**king bar’).

From El País in English here: ‘El Fonoll, the medieval village in Spain where clothes are banned. Nestled in the Catalan mountains, this small naturist community was created in 1998 by an entrepreneurial couple on the ruins of a deserted town. Despite the strict rules, it attracts people from all over the world. ‘I will die in El Fonoll, naked but happy,’ says owner Emili Vives’.

Almería: ‘Unlicensed construction and loud decibels: Dreambeach, the largest electronic music festival, celebrates ten years with its new neighbours set against it. After nine editions on Villaricos beach, this Thursday a new edition of Dreambeach starts, which has the support of the Junta de Andalucía and a new location: a plot of land belonging to the owner of the Unión Deportiva Almería football club in El Toyo, near the airport. A local owner says gloomily: “It's 416,000 watts of sound. In the previous location, the nearest houses were 700 meters away and the windows vibrated.” Item from elDiario.es (I’ll be visiting a neighbour there today Thursday).

Free bullfights for juniors? Only in Valencia.

From El Confidencial here: ‘The archaeologist who has found the possible site of Atlantis off the coast of Cádiz: "It is just where Plato said it was". Michael Donnellan has been diving into the depths of the Cádiz coast since 2019 where he has found probable remains of the disappeared city. He explains everything in the documentary 'Atlantica' (trailer here)’.

Since 1375, the French, bound by a treaty known as el Tributo de las Tres Vacas, must pay three moo-cows to the Spanish in tribute. Everyone including the mayors of Baretous and Roncal dress up for the occasion. The solemn event takes place on July 13th. Video and story at Muy Interesante here.

Spain’s Whisky Tart – a silly story at Spanish Shilling here.

An excellent site for animal, bird, insect and plant identification is at Wildside Holidays here.

…...

See Spain:

We don’t often hear of anything good coming out of Albacete, the city on the way north to Madrid from Almería or Murcia, but it does have its charms too, as The Olive Press tells us here: ‘Many tourists come to Spain to experience the beauty of Madrid’s Gran Via or Barcelona’s Las Ramblas but those who venture beyond the big cities will be rewarded with some of the country’s prettiest streets. In the rarely visited Albacete, is the Pasaje de Lodares, declared a monument of national interest in 1996’.  

……

Letters:

I had trouble last week with the gmails sent to gmails (‘Scanned by Gmail’). Well done Google! They do it every now and then, which is a bother.

From Maria, ‘It’s because you put BoT in the subject-line. It unnerves them’.

She may be right at that.

…...

Finally:

Hermanos Gutierrez ‘El Bueno Y El Malo’ on YouTube here (laid back Ecuadorian-Swiss Latin-blues guitar).