Rajoy drawn into corruption scandal
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Eurozone crisis live: Spanish PM accused of secret payments | Business | guardian.co.uk
Corruption Charges Have Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy on the Defensive - SPIEGEL ONLINE
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Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy Hit With Corruption Charges
Spain’s prime minister has become embroiled in a growing scandal over secret cash payments to ruling party politicians after a newspaper published what it claimed to be accounts showing payments reaching as high as Mariano Rajoy himself.
The Popular Party on Thursday again denied that its leaders, including Mr Rajoy, received regular cash payments funded from donations from construction companies, as flames from the corruption allegations licked at the feet of its most senior figures.
The PP insisted that no party leader received payments outside their regular salaries after El Pais, Spain’s biggest selling daily, claimed that the prime minister had received €25,200 each year since 1997 in payments made every three or six months, reproducing on its front page what it claimed to be photos of the former PP treasurer’s accounting book.
The Popular Party said on Thursday that it did not recognise the accounts. It denied any member had been paid outside their normal salaries, and insisted no form of secret accounting had taken place.
“We have only one set of books and they are clean ... We have absolutely nothing to hide,” the PP’s general secretary Maria Dolores de Cospedal told a news conference in Madrid on Thursday.
A spokeswoman for Mr Rajoy declined to comment.
The allegations come at a time when confidence in Spain’s political elite has hit an all-time low with evidence of mounting popular anger at a string of high-profile corruption cases, including one brought against Iñaki Urdangarin, son-in-law of King Juan Carlos, who is accused of embezzling millions of euros from charitable organisations.
“The level of trust in politicians in Spain is very, very low, and corruption is one of the main problems,” said Antonio Argandoña, professor of Business Ethics and Economics at IESE Business School. “Politicians must tackle this problem before any more damage is done”.
A recent poll for El Pais newspaper suggested that 96 per cent of Spaniards believed that political corruption was “very high”.
Mr Rajoy had previously ordered an internal investigation of his party’s finances after other newspaper reports alleging that Luis Barcenas, a former PP treasurer who stepped down as a result of a corruption probe, had regularly given out cash payments to senior party officials. The scandal originally broke after Spain’s national court reported that Mr Barcenas had built up a €22m fortune in a Swiss bank account.
Mr Barcenas was later revealed to have taken advantage of a fiscal amnesty passed by the Rajoy government to allow money held abroad to be brought back to Spain if the owner paid a 10 per cent tax on it – less than half the country’s income tax rate.
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