The Conflict of Interest Office files the PP complaint against Sánchez for the rescue of Air Europa | Spain

The Conflict of Interest Office has filed the PP’s complaint against Pedro Sánchez for the alleged relationship with the rescue of Air Europa in November 2020 and the “ties of an economic and professional nature” of the wife of the President of the Government, Begoña Gómez. After analyzing the Popular Party’s complaint, the office understands that “the assumption provided for in the rule does not exist that allows it to be considered that the President of the Government may have incurred a cause of abstention that requires the initiation of an investigation procedure in order to clarify responsibilities for the decisions of the Council of Ministers of November 3, 2020 and March 16, 2021, so the complaint is filed.”

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“We said at the time that this issue had no legal basis, and that the PP was only seeking to introduce more noise to cover up the scandal, this one, which is hanging over Isabel Díaz Ayuso, and now also over her chief of staff,” he said. Esther Peña, spokesperson for the PSOE, reacted in reference to the fraud of Alberto González, boyfriend of the president of the Community of Madrid, of at least 350,000 euros to the Treasury in the years 2020 and 2021, as well as the threats of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez to a journalist from eldiario.es after they first reported the scandal. “Surely the PP will now say that the Conflict of Interest Office is at the service of the Government, etcetera, etcetera. It’s always the same. If the institutions, from Justice to the Treasury, agree with the PP, everything is perfect. And if they don’t agree, the demolition of the prestige of our country’s institutions is their usual practice,” Peña added.

Sources from the popular leadership acknowledged last week that they had decided to present the complaint, a direct attack on the personal environment of the President of the Government, in response to the “tone” and content of Sánchez’s intervention in the control session on Wednesday at the Congress, in which the general secretary of the PSOE urged Isabel Díaz Ayuso to resign as president of Madrid due to her partner’s tax fraud.

The PP registered the complaint on Thursday “to determine the responsibility” of the President of the Government “for not being absent from the Councils of Ministers that made decisions favorable to a company that had ties of an economic and professional nature with his wife, Begoña Gómez,” according to The main opposition party then pointed out. The approval of public aid to the Hidalgo family company followed the same channels as other airline companies urgently rescued in the middle of the pandemic. The rescue was approved in November 2020 by the Council of Ministers and amounted to 475 million in loans that have not yet been returned, but are still alive.

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Feijóo’s formation maintained that Sánchez could have incurred a serious infraction classified in Law 3/2015 regulating the exercise of high office of the General Administration of the State, with a sanction of inability to hold a high position position for a period of between 5 and 10 years. The Office of Conflicts of Interest, a body that depends on the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Service, concludes that no violation has occurred.

The popular parties also requested from the Tax Agency, the Social Security management bodies and the public employment services the information they have available to determine the nature of the legal relationship that existed between the Instituto de Empresa (IE) and Begoña Gómez, as well as the remuneration received by the president’s wife. In its resolution, the Conflict of Interest Office considers “with respect to the rest of the requests contained in the complaint (…) that they are requests that do not correspond to its powers, given that Ms. Gómez has not been “She is neither a senior official nor an employee of the General State Administration.”

IE, a private university to which the IE Africa Center belongs, which Gómez directed between 2018 and 2022, denies that this center, nor the IE nor its foundation received money from Globalia – the parent company of the airline Air Europa – nor its subsidiary Wakalua, a global tourism innovation hub. The entity maintains that it did not receive any financial amount under a collaboration agreement signed in January 2020, months before the public rescue of Air Europa, which took place in November of that year.

As noted by IE in a statement, in January 2020, IE Africa Center, dedicated to innovation on the African continent, signed a collaboration agreement with Wakalua “for the celebration of various events related to innovation in the tourism sector.” Of these events, the university reported, the first was organized in London and the hub tourism contributed to its celebration “with a contribution of four plane tickets with the speakers that were managed directly with the interested parties.”

With the arrival of the pandemic in Spain and the declaration of the state of alarm, the agreement was interrupted. “It was never carried out due to the circumstances of the moment,” the IE points out in its note, in which it specifies that later, with the normalization of the health situation and the end of the restrictions derived from the coronavirus pandemic, were the operations resumed. collaborations. Since then, the IE specifies, the university “has had no further contact nor has it developed projects of any kind with these institutions.”

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