If you're a politician who has more or less got everything, what else might you wish for? A fine yacht with which you can serenely sail around the shores of a summertime Mallorca? Possibly, but it's unlikely that your ego (and indeed money) will stretch to the obscene ostentation to be found floating on the calm waters of Palma bay. Better to not even try to compete. How about instead having your own police force? While among the fantasy flotilla will be those capable of boasting that they have their own armies, a personal brigade of cops would still do nicely in pandering to your need for self-actualisation.
José María Rodríguez denies having conspired to create a police force within a police force, one to be allied to the Partido Popular with the aim of benefiting certain business people and friends of the party to the disadvantage of rival business people and political enemies. Never, he insists, did he organise a policing system to "monitor" anyone, including judges and prosecutors. One of these prosecutors, Miguel Ángel Subiran asked him outright if he had. "Never ever."
José María has done a great deal of denying in his time. The legal status of "imputado" is a peculiar one that stops short of actually being charged. Suspected but no more. Many a politician has found him or herself "imputado", often to then have this "archived" by a court that has not found evidence to proceed to the next stage of formally charging and trial. Generally, this happens only the once. With José María, he's been making a bit of a habit of it. Had he, for instance, once phoned the then mayor of Andratx and given a tip-off that the cops were coming (he was Balearic interior minister at the time)? No, he had not, the judge was told. There were records of phone calls in the days before the cops arrived. Could have been about anything. The weather, for example.
José María also denies ever having been to an "alternative club" (the nice way of saying a whorehouse). "It disgusts me," he says. Stories that have emerged of the investigation into police corruption which include references to "old" men at sex parties arranged by friendly business people disgust everyone else.
The judge has issued a restraining order. The reason? To prevent José María getting at witnesses or others. He cannot, for instance, go within 300 metres of local police facilities. What happens if he does? Is there a José María warning system that sounds an alarm if he is 299 metres away?
Restraining orders were the order of the week. Cops were being restrained as well. Two senior ones in Palma and that good old boy in Magalluf, the ex-chief of police from Calvia, José Antonio Navarro, of whom a great deal could be said but which is perhaps best left for the time being.
Because José Antonio was on the point of starting work again, the judge decided it was time to slap the restraining order on him. He can't go near Calvia police or the town hall. On the point of starting work again? Where had he been? On sick leave. And seemingly so ever since he was released having spent 40 days banged up when he was arrested a couple of years ago. How does that all work? If there's a compliant doctor it can work easily enough, it would appear. The judge in the police corruption investigation wants to take action the doctor who signed off several Palma cops - all under suspicion - without even having seen them: he was going on medical reports from the prison.
Had there not been a restraining order or the subsequent suspension from duty, what might "Sick Note" José Antonio have been doing on his return after the prolonged absence? A spot of community policing perhaps? Likewise, what were the two former chiefs of police in Palma, both also faced with restraining orders and now suspended, doing? Innocent until and all that, but they don't appear to have been on sick leave, unlike the one before both of them who was.
This sordid affair, a corruption investigation more damaging than any of those into mere pilfering of public funds, throws up all manner of weirdness. It was revealed last week that a year ago there had been a phone call to the 112 emergency line from the San Fernando (Sant Ferran) police HQ which was complaining about the noise from an event that was taking place some two kilometres away at a club on the Paseo Marítimo.
This was for the Ella lesbian festival. In attendance, among others, were the mayor of Palma, José Hila, and tourism minister Biel Barceló. The call, and later ones from a mobile, were suspected to have come from an inspector named Capó, one of the police officers in Palma who is "imputado" in the corruption investigation. He denied in court having made the call (calls).
Returning to José María, it might be recalled that he once took action against Pilar Costa, now the spokesperson for the Balearic government, for having called him a "capo", which has a different meaning to "capó" when there is an accent. The latter means bonnet or hood of a car. Hood, however, might also be applicable to "capo" without an accent - a mafia boss. Judge Penalva, the investigating judge, who like the prosecutor Subiran has been given permission to carry a gun, described José María last month as the "architect in the shadows" of a corrupt organisation, an organisation the judge has also referred to as a criminal organisation.
Denial is everything.
Showing posts with label José María Rodríguez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label José María Rodríguez. Show all posts
Monday, August 29, 2016
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Two More Than Ordinary Joes
In the blue corner, José; in the other blue corner, José. Smokin' Joe, José Ramón Bauzá versus Stokin' Joe, José María Rodríguez. A fight they said would never happen. It's going the distance, ten rounds or more between the champion of the Partido Popular in the Balearics, José Ramón, and the champion of the Palma wing of the party, José María. The president thought he had delivered a knockout blow, but José María, no sign of any injured shoulder, came swinging back. He was going nowhere.
On Monday, José Ramón stated that José María's time with the PP was up. The fight's authority, the anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, had implied that José María was unfit to carry on fighting: all to do with payments in black for the PP's 2003 election campaign for which he won't carry the can because of statute of limitations. Never mind this legal technicality, reckoned José Ramón. The bell had rung for the last time for José María.
By the end of the week, José María was making it clear that he was not about to resign as party president in Palma. An embarrassing and frosty encounter between the two Joes at a dinner at which it was hoped that differences could be patched up exposed the vast rift that developed in PP-land over the week. It had been an earthquake on a potentially terminal scale. "Rodriguistas" in Palma were coming to the defence of their man. If Bauzá was so insistent on Rodríguez resigning, they wouldn't attend a meeting between Bauzá and Mariano Rajoy, planned some time before the 24 May election. The conspicuousness of their absence would provide a "lethal image" for Bauzá.
It is perhaps too simple to say that Bauzá was reacting to the Horrach declaration regarding black payments. There had been a damning article in the Spanish press which said that Bauzá was a "hostage" to Rodríguez. In other words, he couldn't live without him, much though he would prefer not to have to. Palma's PP list of candidates had been filled with "Rodriguistas" - the mayoral candidate, Marga Durán, the number two, Alvaro Gijón - and Bauzá had been party to this. By siding with Rodríguez, who had been stoking the fires to rid Palma of a too independently minded Mateo Isern, over the purging of Isern, he had given them succour.
This is a strange affair. I am convinced that Bauzá never wanted Rodríguez to be the national government delegate to the Balearics - an appointment made in late 2011 - and that he was more than happy when Rodríguez was forced out of this post when he was implicated as part of the massive Palma Arena criminal investigation. Yet, he was in a way a hostage to him, a hostage to an old-style PP in the Balearics.
Bauzá, for all his faults, has attempted to be a moderniser. He has made mistakes, many of them, but he has sought to rid the party of the stench of corruption that still hangs over it from the Matas era (Rodríguez was a minister under Matas) and to move it in a direction that is less parochial, one represented by one-time president Cristòfol Soler, now no longer a member of the party. One of his greatest mistakes was Isern, who he saw as a rival. By allowing this to cloud his judgement, he became a hostage to the "Rodriguistas", and so the fight will continue till the last breath, when they both may well expire on 24 May.
On Monday, José Ramón stated that José María's time with the PP was up. The fight's authority, the anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, had implied that José María was unfit to carry on fighting: all to do with payments in black for the PP's 2003 election campaign for which he won't carry the can because of statute of limitations. Never mind this legal technicality, reckoned José Ramón. The bell had rung for the last time for José María.
By the end of the week, José María was making it clear that he was not about to resign as party president in Palma. An embarrassing and frosty encounter between the two Joes at a dinner at which it was hoped that differences could be patched up exposed the vast rift that developed in PP-land over the week. It had been an earthquake on a potentially terminal scale. "Rodriguistas" in Palma were coming to the defence of their man. If Bauzá was so insistent on Rodríguez resigning, they wouldn't attend a meeting between Bauzá and Mariano Rajoy, planned some time before the 24 May election. The conspicuousness of their absence would provide a "lethal image" for Bauzá.
It is perhaps too simple to say that Bauzá was reacting to the Horrach declaration regarding black payments. There had been a damning article in the Spanish press which said that Bauzá was a "hostage" to Rodríguez. In other words, he couldn't live without him, much though he would prefer not to have to. Palma's PP list of candidates had been filled with "Rodriguistas" - the mayoral candidate, Marga Durán, the number two, Alvaro Gijón - and Bauzá had been party to this. By siding with Rodríguez, who had been stoking the fires to rid Palma of a too independently minded Mateo Isern, over the purging of Isern, he had given them succour.
This is a strange affair. I am convinced that Bauzá never wanted Rodríguez to be the national government delegate to the Balearics - an appointment made in late 2011 - and that he was more than happy when Rodríguez was forced out of this post when he was implicated as part of the massive Palma Arena criminal investigation. Yet, he was in a way a hostage to him, a hostage to an old-style PP in the Balearics.
Bauzá, for all his faults, has attempted to be a moderniser. He has made mistakes, many of them, but he has sought to rid the party of the stench of corruption that still hangs over it from the Matas era (Rodríguez was a minister under Matas) and to move it in a direction that is less parochial, one represented by one-time president Cristòfol Soler, now no longer a member of the party. One of his greatest mistakes was Isern, who he saw as a rival. By allowing this to cloud his judgement, he became a hostage to the "Rodriguistas", and so the fight will continue till the last breath, when they both may well expire on 24 May.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
The Great Survivor Of The PP
While the "list" of Partido Popular candidates for the Calvia municipal election caused a slight rumpus that would, for the most part one suspects, have been lost on the natives, the equivalent in Palma has not gone unremarked upon among a wider citizenry. As was already known, at number one on the list and so the prospective new mayor, is Marga Durán, whose selection last October was greeted with widespread disbelief. As I remarked at the time: "Margalida's stellar political career lacks only one thing - star quality". Described by others as a "neophyte", i.e. a novice, she had become parliamentary president at the end of 2012, having previously set parliament alight with a total of six questions that she had ever asked, "each of them designed to reveal the greater glory of the master" (aka President Bauzá).
Her selection was therefore interpreted as reward for compliant loyalty to José Ramón, but it also bore the hallmark of the real power behind the Palma PP throne, José María Rodríguez, the president of the PP in the city. Rodríguez, just as much as Bauzá, wanted rid of the all-too-independently-minded (and popular) Mateo Isern. And he got what he wanted. The list of council candidates reveals the extent of the purge of Isern. They are pretty much all so-called Rodriguistas.
If anyone in Mallorca's politics can be described as a survivor, then it is Rodríguez. During the time of the first president of the Balearics, Gabriel Cañellas, he was the director of the government agency IFEBAL, which promoted trade fairs and congresses in the Balearics. He became a Palma councillor in 1995 and was a deputy mayor until 2003, when he became the minister of interior in the Matas government. Four years of PSOE administration intervened from 2007, but at the end of 2011 he was back, and this time as the national government's delegate in the Balearics. He wasn't to last very long.
The anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, in investigating one of the many strands of the Palma Arena affair (one that has of course embraced Matas as well as Princess Cristina and her husband), has announced that in 2003 Rodríguez illegally financed the Matas PP electoral campaign. Horrach has established that he handed over 24,000 euros cash (black money) to the owner of the Over Marketing publicity agency that was running the PP promotional campaign. There will be no charge brought against Rodríguez: the statute of limitations doesn't permit it.
In 2006, when he was interior minister, Rodríguez made a telephone call to the mayor of Andratx, Eugenio Hidalgo. He admitted that he made the call. Not long after the call, Hidalgo was arrested. The investigating judge, Alvaro Latorre, sought evidence from, among other sources, Andratx Town Hall security cameras, in order to identify who had been putting documents into rubbish containers. Rodríguez was to flatly deny that he had tipped Hidalgo off. The arrest led to what was called the "caso Andratx", the first ever corruption investigation of its type in Mallorca (into urban planning abuses), and subsequently led to the whole Palma Arena affair.
In July 2012, having been in his post for only six months, Rodríguez resigned as government delegate. He had been forced to because the Guardia Civil was looking into contracts relating to Over Marketing with Judge José Castro interested in allegedly irregular payments made by the PP to the agency. Rodríguez defended his innocence and considered that his departure was "unjust". He said that his political life had been one guided by the idea of public service and by seeking to improve the lot of the citizen. The prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, has now offered his judgement on this idea of public service.
When Rodríguez was chosen as the government delegate, there was some surprise. It was a choice made with the agreement of President Bauzá and the Rajoy administration, but for Bauzá, it seemed one that he was accepting against his better judgement. He had vowed to have a clean government, but there was that old suspicion about the phone call. And there was also the fact that Rodríguez was close to the Matas regime; so close that he was having lunch with Matas in the weeks leading up to his going into prison. This regime, tainted by corruption, also represented the old guard that Bauzá appeared intent on sweeping away. Yet, Rodríguez survived, if only for a few months. His resignation was an embarrassment, but one suspects that Bauzá was secretly relieved. That Bauzá was to subsequently side with Rodríguez in the purging of Isern owed little to a desire for the return of the old guard: Bauzá wanted rid because of Isern's popularity.
Despite everything, Rodríguez remains, pulling the strings in Palma. He has survived, though whether the PP survives the wishes of the electorate, we will soon find out.
Her selection was therefore interpreted as reward for compliant loyalty to José Ramón, but it also bore the hallmark of the real power behind the Palma PP throne, José María Rodríguez, the president of the PP in the city. Rodríguez, just as much as Bauzá, wanted rid of the all-too-independently-minded (and popular) Mateo Isern. And he got what he wanted. The list of council candidates reveals the extent of the purge of Isern. They are pretty much all so-called Rodriguistas.
If anyone in Mallorca's politics can be described as a survivor, then it is Rodríguez. During the time of the first president of the Balearics, Gabriel Cañellas, he was the director of the government agency IFEBAL, which promoted trade fairs and congresses in the Balearics. He became a Palma councillor in 1995 and was a deputy mayor until 2003, when he became the minister of interior in the Matas government. Four years of PSOE administration intervened from 2007, but at the end of 2011 he was back, and this time as the national government's delegate in the Balearics. He wasn't to last very long.
The anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, in investigating one of the many strands of the Palma Arena affair (one that has of course embraced Matas as well as Princess Cristina and her husband), has announced that in 2003 Rodríguez illegally financed the Matas PP electoral campaign. Horrach has established that he handed over 24,000 euros cash (black money) to the owner of the Over Marketing publicity agency that was running the PP promotional campaign. There will be no charge brought against Rodríguez: the statute of limitations doesn't permit it.
In 2006, when he was interior minister, Rodríguez made a telephone call to the mayor of Andratx, Eugenio Hidalgo. He admitted that he made the call. Not long after the call, Hidalgo was arrested. The investigating judge, Alvaro Latorre, sought evidence from, among other sources, Andratx Town Hall security cameras, in order to identify who had been putting documents into rubbish containers. Rodríguez was to flatly deny that he had tipped Hidalgo off. The arrest led to what was called the "caso Andratx", the first ever corruption investigation of its type in Mallorca (into urban planning abuses), and subsequently led to the whole Palma Arena affair.
In July 2012, having been in his post for only six months, Rodríguez resigned as government delegate. He had been forced to because the Guardia Civil was looking into contracts relating to Over Marketing with Judge José Castro interested in allegedly irregular payments made by the PP to the agency. Rodríguez defended his innocence and considered that his departure was "unjust". He said that his political life had been one guided by the idea of public service and by seeking to improve the lot of the citizen. The prosecutor, Pedro Horrach, has now offered his judgement on this idea of public service.
When Rodríguez was chosen as the government delegate, there was some surprise. It was a choice made with the agreement of President Bauzá and the Rajoy administration, but for Bauzá, it seemed one that he was accepting against his better judgement. He had vowed to have a clean government, but there was that old suspicion about the phone call. And there was also the fact that Rodríguez was close to the Matas regime; so close that he was having lunch with Matas in the weeks leading up to his going into prison. This regime, tainted by corruption, also represented the old guard that Bauzá appeared intent on sweeping away. Yet, Rodríguez survived, if only for a few months. His resignation was an embarrassment, but one suspects that Bauzá was secretly relieved. That Bauzá was to subsequently side with Rodríguez in the purging of Isern owed little to a desire for the return of the old guard: Bauzá wanted rid because of Isern's popularity.
Despite everything, Rodríguez remains, pulling the strings in Palma. He has survived, though whether the PP survives the wishes of the electorate, we will soon find out.
Monday, September 08, 2014
Likability: Isern versus Bauzá
Palma is a big city. 407,648 inhabitants, according to 2012 figures, getting on for half the population of the island and over a third of the total Balearics population. It is Spain's eighth largest city, but its bigness is magnified because of the smallness of the rest of the population and so confers on it a status that is disproportionately large for its size. And a way this status reveals itself is through the public administration of the city - it is a virtual government within a government.
When you preside over a city of such status, your role as mayor is unlike that of any other town in the Balearics. It carries a very much greater responsibility and it brings with it recognition. You are the one mayor in Mallorca who people will have heard of (though there can't be many who now also haven't heard of Manu Onieva). It is a recognition which affords you a certain power if you so wish to exercise this power. You command over 400,000 people. Popular, and you are a force to be reckoned with.
Mateo Isern will not be liked by all, but he has a public profile of likability. Being liked is not a pre-requisite for public office, but it doesn't harm a politician if he or she has a well of goodwill that likability generates. Such likability can be turned to one's advantage, especially if there are others around who are liked less or very little.
Isern's likability factor has been such that it might have been forecast that he would, despite the plummeting likability of his party - the PP - hang on to his role as head of the Palma government within a government. But when there is a government within a government, there comes an additional pressure - that of party wars: in Isern's case, his own party. He will not be mayor come next spring, not because his party wouldn't have received sufficient votes but because his party won't let him. Or rather, the "Rodríguez" faction in Palma in alliance with President Bauzá won't let him.
Isern has been a dead man walking for months. José María Rodríguez, the PP's political chief in Palma, never exactly well-disposed to Isern, has, it would appear, been working with Bauzá on the plan to get rid of Isern since the spring. His alliance with Bauzá seems a little odd. Rodríguez is of the Matas era, someone who was forced to resign as the government delegate for the Balearics - a job he got, one always fancied, with less some fulsome support from Bauzá - when the spectre of corruption surrounded him; he was implicated as part of the investigations into Matas. What swung Bauzá around to the side of the so-called "rodriguistas" in Palma was the massive fallout he had with Isern.
This was partly caused by the spat between the two over where the second casino in Palma should be located. Three months after it, Isern offered to resign. Bauzá wouldn't let him, though the more likely reason for him not going was that Madrid got very agitated about the prospect of a popular mayor walking off the job. The bad blood because of that spat back in November last year has never been cured. Isern has, since then, appeared to be a possible challenger to Bauzá. He has seemed less than enthusiastic about certain government policies - language, for example - and in April he was the star turn at a lunch held in Muro where there was talk of a convention being called to seek drastic changes to the direction of the Bauzá administration. That lunch was probably the tipping-point and what took Bauzá into the arms of the "rodriguistas". Isern's number was going to be up, and a way of ensuring that he didn't decide to stand again as mayor or to make life very difficult for him was to load the "list" of Palma PP candidates with "rodriguistas".
Isern has seemingly enjoyed the support of certain PP prominenti in Madrid, notably María Dolores Cospedal, the party's secretary-general, and there is some thought that Madrid will get involved in the whole affair, especially now as the local PP party machine is intending to use a system of primaries to select the mayoral candidate in Palma, despite Isern saying that the party statutes don't recognise such a system.
Behind all of this affair, one suspects that there is another dynamic. There has been a personality clash and it has been one between a liked and a disliked politician. Bauzá has made so many enemies that he was bound to have become disliked. Maybe he is jealous of Isern's likability, but depriving him of the mayor's job might just backfire on him. When you are head of a government within a government, it is not too big a leap to become head of the government.
When you preside over a city of such status, your role as mayor is unlike that of any other town in the Balearics. It carries a very much greater responsibility and it brings with it recognition. You are the one mayor in Mallorca who people will have heard of (though there can't be many who now also haven't heard of Manu Onieva). It is a recognition which affords you a certain power if you so wish to exercise this power. You command over 400,000 people. Popular, and you are a force to be reckoned with.
Mateo Isern will not be liked by all, but he has a public profile of likability. Being liked is not a pre-requisite for public office, but it doesn't harm a politician if he or she has a well of goodwill that likability generates. Such likability can be turned to one's advantage, especially if there are others around who are liked less or very little.
Isern's likability factor has been such that it might have been forecast that he would, despite the plummeting likability of his party - the PP - hang on to his role as head of the Palma government within a government. But when there is a government within a government, there comes an additional pressure - that of party wars: in Isern's case, his own party. He will not be mayor come next spring, not because his party wouldn't have received sufficient votes but because his party won't let him. Or rather, the "Rodríguez" faction in Palma in alliance with President Bauzá won't let him.
Isern has been a dead man walking for months. José María Rodríguez, the PP's political chief in Palma, never exactly well-disposed to Isern, has, it would appear, been working with Bauzá on the plan to get rid of Isern since the spring. His alliance with Bauzá seems a little odd. Rodríguez is of the Matas era, someone who was forced to resign as the government delegate for the Balearics - a job he got, one always fancied, with less some fulsome support from Bauzá - when the spectre of corruption surrounded him; he was implicated as part of the investigations into Matas. What swung Bauzá around to the side of the so-called "rodriguistas" in Palma was the massive fallout he had with Isern.
This was partly caused by the spat between the two over where the second casino in Palma should be located. Three months after it, Isern offered to resign. Bauzá wouldn't let him, though the more likely reason for him not going was that Madrid got very agitated about the prospect of a popular mayor walking off the job. The bad blood because of that spat back in November last year has never been cured. Isern has, since then, appeared to be a possible challenger to Bauzá. He has seemed less than enthusiastic about certain government policies - language, for example - and in April he was the star turn at a lunch held in Muro where there was talk of a convention being called to seek drastic changes to the direction of the Bauzá administration. That lunch was probably the tipping-point and what took Bauzá into the arms of the "rodriguistas". Isern's number was going to be up, and a way of ensuring that he didn't decide to stand again as mayor or to make life very difficult for him was to load the "list" of Palma PP candidates with "rodriguistas".
Isern has seemingly enjoyed the support of certain PP prominenti in Madrid, notably María Dolores Cospedal, the party's secretary-general, and there is some thought that Madrid will get involved in the whole affair, especially now as the local PP party machine is intending to use a system of primaries to select the mayoral candidate in Palma, despite Isern saying that the party statutes don't recognise such a system.
Behind all of this affair, one suspects that there is another dynamic. There has been a personality clash and it has been one between a liked and a disliked politician. Bauzá has made so many enemies that he was bound to have become disliked. Maybe he is jealous of Isern's likability, but depriving him of the mayor's job might just backfire on him. When you are head of a government within a government, it is not too big a leap to become head of the government.
Monday, July 16, 2012
MALLORCA TODAY - Rodríguez resigns because of corruption allegation
The national government delegate in the Balearic Islands, José María Rodríguez, has resigned as a result of an investigation into his alleged involvement in a corruption case dating back to when he was interior minister in the Jaume Matas government in the Balearics. Calls had been made for Rodríguez to resign but he had until today rejected them.
See more: Diario de Mallorca
See more: Diario de Mallorca
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