When Canaries Sing Of Corruption

Just when you thought that everyone had gone away on their jollies and that the rest of August would lie quietly in the deep heat-induced somnolence of late summer and maintain the enervated silence induced by thirty degrees, a good lunch and a bucket of sangria, something stirs deep in the cesspit of the past and explodes with the force of a sewage pipe ripped apart by the pressure of accumulated and stinking waste. It is an eruption of the most unhealthy variety, spewing out over the monument of Mallorca's health service. The deep-cleaned, bacteria-free white walls of Son Espases were showered with muck of the brownest type.

Aina Castillo was Jaume Matas's most loyal acolyte. Not is. Was. While others had long waved their hankies at the shoreline and watched as their former master was sunk by their confessions, Aina, the one-time subservient servant at the ministry of sanitation, had continued to calm the drowning former president with her enduring loyalty. Until, that is. As any good canary can tell you, when there is a whiff of gas, there is danger ahead. It is time to get out quick. Or it is time to activate the explosion before the explosion launches you over the battlements of Palma's jail and deposits you on top of Maria Munar. It is time for all good canaries to sing. Aina sang. This was not a love song. "I have a new goal, I'm changing my ways. Where money applies, this is not a love song." The Johnny Rottenness of public image was fully exposed. Money had applied all along. Aina had changed her ways. The anti-corruption prosecutors were taking aim at the goal, one already inside a gaol. Aina blew the lid on the sewage pipe. Matas had rigged the tender to construct Son Espases. The biggest corruption scandal of the lot had shattered the sleep and dreamtime of late August.

Of course, everyone had long suspected that Son Espases was iffy. It was just that the nature of the iffiness was not known. It is now. Jaume gave instructions that one of the bidders should gain higher marks. The winner was Dragados. Technical reports had given a rival, OHL, better marks. But it still lost.

Prosecutors will be having a word with Jaume, currently on leave in Segovia's prison. The "caso Son Espases" threatens to eclipse even the Palma Arena affair. And for the present incumbent in the presidential palace, José Ramón Bauzá, it is a horrible reminder of the not-so-long-ago past. The bad debts that Matas had left had been written off, so Joserra has said. The biggest debt of all now brings renewed harmfulness. And what does the president do about Aina? She's still knocking around. His presidency was to have been a clean one. Unfortunately, it can't be because it can't escape the recent past. Not when the walls of Son Espases are dripping with the filth of corruption.