For a decade Andalusian socialism embezzled hundreds of millions of euros to put together a gigantic clientele network with which to go doped to the polls and ensure the perpetuation of regional power. He diverted the money destined to the unemployed to articulate a parallel procedure of payments to companies, unions, groups and individuals without subject to the law, generating a deficit that compromised the budget credit and harmed the welfare needs of the unemployed. And he did it from the structure of the Junta de Andalucía. This yesterday proved the Audience of Seville in its sentence.

The puerile recourse to the alleged ignorance of the top political leaders is completely disjointed by the judge, who states that the monumental ERE scam could not be armed without his knowledge , but rather demanded "the decision of the hierarchical superior." Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán were, says the sentence, "fully aware of the palmarias irregularities" in which they participated. They were aware that their subordinates had eliminated the legally established control mechanisms to replace them with a discretionary system of fraudulent distribution of public money. It was about buying wills by finger from the pocket of citizens through suppliers connected with the PSOE-A, which copied the Board for 40 years. It was, in short, to steal 680 million euros from the treasury to grease the machinery of a corrupt regime built and sustained by Andalusian socialism.

This is the conclusion already accredited by the historic ruling of the Audience of Seville in the political piece of the ERE. The judge largely responds to the request of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor to condemn a score of high socialist positions for crimes of prevarication and embezzlement. Two former presidents of the Board and the PSOE: Chaves and Griñán, who were also respectively vice president of the Zapatero Government and minister with Felipe González; seven regional councilors, including former minister Magdalena Álvarez; two former vice councilors, three former CEOs - including one of the executors of the plot: Francisco Javier Guerrero -, two former CEOs and three former general secretaries. That is, the dome of the Junta de Andalucía itself for years.

Because of the hardness of the sentence, the size of the sentences - 61 years in jail and 252 total disqualification - and the political entity of the convicted, we would have expected a less embarrassing reaction from the current secretary of the PSOE Organization , José Luis Ábalos. That he struggled unsuccessfully - with the help of his future Cabinet companion, Pablo Iglesias, once the scourge of the corrupt caste - in the impossible task of building a retaining wall between the party and the "leaders of the Junta de Andalucía" . As if a former president of the PSOE was not going to enter prison, or as if Chaves had not been the cacid incarnation of Andalusian socialism for two decades.

It seems very likely that the publication of this sentence when planned, in the middle of the campaign, could have caused an electoral turnaround, aggravating the loss of 760,000 votes suffered by the PSOE on 10-N. In any case, Sanchez justified the motion of censure that appealed to power by invoking a sentence introduced by a judge challenged in a Gürtel ruling. Now that the hardest corruption condemnation of democracy has fallen on his party, he has lost credibility - as well - as an exponent of regeneration. Against who was tired of repeating that the PP is a corrupt party, it is possible to use today, using its own rhetoric, that the PSOE, in the figure of its main Andalusian referents, is also. Not only that: is that the amount of money embezzled by Andalusian socialism is unparalleled with any other case of corruption known to date. EL MUNDO uncovered the scandal in December 2010, and a year later Judge Alaya opened the first investigations. It has taken almost a decade for the political leaders of that gigantic latrocinio to know the guilty verdict that does justice to an era of socialist corruption.

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  • PSOE
  • Pablo Iglesias
  • PP
  • Manuel Chaves
  • José Luis Ábalos
  • José Antonio Griñán
  • Felipe Gonzalez
  • Corruption
  • Pedro Sanchez
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