At the end of September, the journalist Antonio Alemany presented a plea for a pardon to be considered. He was seeking this pardon as a way of avoiding serving a prison sentence of two years and three months that was handed down at the end of a trial which also involved former president of the Balearics, Jaume Matas, and which resulted in Alemany having been found guilty of having received irregular payments, made from public funds, for speeches and articles he had written for and about Matas. The pardon plea was presented to the "Audiencia" in Palma, the court which had heard the case. As his sentence was for less than three years, the court had to accept that Alemany's entrance into prison would be suspended, pending the processing of the pardon plea.
Three weeks later, the court had to agree to his not entering prison because there was a possibility that he could serve his sentence but then receive the pardon. The fact that this was a possibility serves to highlight quite how slowly the judicial process can move. The court, in acceding to the plea, laid down certain conditions. One was that Alemany would have to report to police once a month, another was that, if the pardon process had not been resolved by May 2018, the case would go back to court in order to establish whether or not Alemany should indeed enter prison. By May 2018. Over four and a half years later.
It is not for the court to decide on the pardon plea. Its processing is undertaken by the national Ministry of Justice. It gathers all the information relevant to the case and this is then given to the Cabinet (of Mariano Rajoy) to make a decision. There is a minimum period that this processing requires. Approximately one year. As far as there being a maximum period, perhaps May 2018 gives an indication as to how long this might be.
Alemany is not the only defendant to have been found guilty to seek a pardon from the Prime Minister. A former colleague of Mariano Rajoy's in national government is also seeking one. Jaume Matas. He had initially been sentenced to six years for the same case as that involving Alemany. The sentence was reduced to nine months.
There is something of a convention that sentences for first offences of under two years mean that a spell in prison is avoided. Where Matas was concerned, it had looked as though this would be the case, but the court has insisted otherwise. Once it seemed as if he would have to enter prison, the pardon was sought.
In July, the former president of the Council of Mallorca, Maria Antònia Munar, went to prison to serve a sentence of five and a half years. In October, her lawyer, responding to confirmation of the sentence by the Balearics High Court, indicated that he might seek either a "recurso de amparo" or a partial pardon for his client. The "amparo", which would, in this instance, be granted by the Constitutional Court, is a legal remedy akin to habeas corpus. The word means protection, and its purpose is to protect citizens and to guarantee that basic rights are not being violated.
It would be unlikely that the Constitutional Court would uphold the amparo plea, as to do so it would need to establish that a fundamental right had been breached. Munar continues to argue her innocence, but her sentence has been upheld and she indeed faces, like Matas, other possible sentencing. Were a pardon to be considered, this wouldn't mean that she could leave prison. Once there, she stays there until or if it is decided she has been there long enough (less than the five and a half years in all likelihood).
It has emerged that, prior to going into prison, Munar sought the help of three leading politicians with the PSOE party. They were the leader of PSOE and former national Interior Minister, Alfredo Rubalcaba, the former president of the Balearics, Francesc Antich, and the one-time director-general of the National Police and Guardia Civil, Joan Mesquida. Help was also sought from a fourth person, the Balearics chief prosecutor. In a letter to Rubalcaba, she pleads with him to intercede on her behalf.
These requests for help amount to requests for influence to be used. As such, they go to the heart of what lies behind corruption - the wielding of influence and the use or abuse of position and power. Are requests for pardons, directed in Matas's case at a former government colleague, not in a sense similar? To be met, they require those in power to not just wield influence but to make the decision.
What justifications are there for pardons? If convictions are wrong, then there are plenty. Have these convictions been, as Munar alludes to in her letters, the result of political persecution? If the convictions are right, then there are surely no justifications.
Showing posts with label Maria Antònia Munar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maria Antònia Munar. Show all posts
Monday, December 16, 2013
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
MALLORCA TODAY - Maria Antònia Munar goes to prison
The former president of the Council of Mallorca and leader of the Unió Mallorquina party, Maria Antònia Munar, will spend her first night tonight in Palma's prison. Munar, who has been found guilty of corrupt practices in two separate cases which have attracted a combined sentence of eleven and a half years, had hoped to stay out of prison for health reasons (she has had cancer), but the Palma court, who passed the second sentence yesterday, sided with prosecutors who wanted her to go to prison without waiting for appeal. The court noted that she may well have money secreted abroad, and so believed that she might be a flight risk. She also has cases pending which could result in prison sentences. Munar was not granted bail and indeed would have been unable to stand personal guarantees as most of her property and money is embargoed.
Munar's entrance into prison contrasts with yesterday's decision by the Balearics High Court to reduce a six-year sentence passed on the former president of the islands, Jaume Matas, to nine months, so meaning that he would not have to go to prison. Munar, who has three days to lodge an appeal for reconsideration of the decision for her to have enter prison, will almost certainly take an appeal to the High Court, which would then have to decide if the sentences should stand.
Munar is by far the most important politician in Mallorca to receive a jail term. There has actually been some surprise that she has been sent to prison, in light of how Matas has been treated and also in light of how in the most celebrated corruption case of the last century - that to do with the Sóller tunnel - it was "archived" and the first president of the Balearics, Gabriel Cañellas, avoided prison.
Munar's entrance into prison contrasts with yesterday's decision by the Balearics High Court to reduce a six-year sentence passed on the former president of the islands, Jaume Matas, to nine months, so meaning that he would not have to go to prison. Munar, who has three days to lodge an appeal for reconsideration of the decision for her to have enter prison, will almost certainly take an appeal to the High Court, which would then have to decide if the sentences should stand.
Munar is by far the most important politician in Mallorca to receive a jail term. There has actually been some surprise that she has been sent to prison, in light of how Matas has been treated and also in light of how in the most celebrated corruption case of the last century - that to do with the Sóller tunnel - it was "archived" and the first president of the Balearics, Gabriel Cañellas, avoided prison.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Mother's Ruin: The fall of Maria Munar
Since autonomous government was established in the Balearics in 1983, two politicians have been synonymous with the islands' democracy. And what democracy it has been. Gabriel Cañellas, president for twelve years from 1983, was forced to resign because of his implication in the Sóller tunnel scandal. He was eventually absolved.
If Cañellas is the patriarch of democracy in a Balearics style, then Maria Antònia Munar is the matriarch. There at the birth of a new party, the Unió Mallorquina, in 1982, Mother Munar went on to become its leader, the president of the Council of Mallorca and the speaker of the Balearics parliament. She has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
The detail of the case against Munar is of little importance. It is the charges that were brought that are. Perverting the course of justice, fraud, falsification of documents, embezzlement of public funds. The charges are almost always the same and they always amount to the same thing: corruption.
There will not be sympathy for Munar. She treated the UM as her fiefdom and dispensed patronage as it suited her. Miguel Nadal, a former tourism minister, and himself sentenced to two years and seven months, owed his succession to leadership of the party to Mother. During a fractious campaign to decide the successor, Nadal at one point threw a hissy fit, withdrew, but was then brought back and anointed by Munar.
This was an example of how Palma dominated UM affairs. Nadal was a Palma man and virtually everything that has since emerged that was corrupt about the UM had to do with Palma. Miguel Llompart, formerly the UM mayor of Alcúdia, once told me that the corruption was all a Palma affair. It wasn't completely, but Palma or not, it had the effect of bringing down an entire political party, now named the Convergència.
Another of those who owed his position to Munar was another ex-tourism minister, Francesc Buils, condemned to three years inside in connection with a different case. Buils, it would seem, just did as he was told. And since sentence was passed on him, a further investigation has been opened up - one to do with alleged irregular payments for coastal cleaning operations under the auspices of Buils' tourism ministry. One of the strangest aspects of this is why the tourism ministry ever got involved in such operations. They had been the responsibility of the environment ministry and yet, for no obviously good reason, they were transferred to tourism. The police are keen to know why. The tourism ministry was to become the focal point for the wave of corruption cases that engulfed the UM.
Munar was widely disliked. One Spanish journalist once headlined an article about her "the most hated woman in Mallorca's history". She is an example of the maxim of all power corrupts, and she was all-powerful, seemingly stripped of principles. I once described her thus: "a Cruella de Vil who has kidnapped a doe-eyed and naïve democracy and bundled it into the back of an official limo, secreted inside a massive wedge of cash". The reference to the cash is to 300,000 euros Munar is supposed to have handed over to Nadal when she was president of the Council.
In March 2010, in an interview with IB3, Munar said that "democracy is based on the confidence that people have in the institutions and politicians, and when this confidence is lost a dictator can emerge". She was absolutely right but a court has proven that she was not righteous. She was a product of the new democracy that, despite the veneer of free political association and the ballot box, still behaved with some of the mores of dictatorship, not least the elevation of the seemingly all-powerful.
President Bauzá is to be applauded in his attempts to rid local politics of corruption. At a time when the deeply worrying voice of the military is expressing its discontent with the political class (clear echoes of the 1930s), the president must be aghast that José Maria Rodríguez, the national delegate to the Balearics, has been forced to resign over corruption allegations that date back to the Matas presidency. Yet, though these allegations relate to a separate case, Rodríguez, when interior minister, was implicated in the Andratx case that resulted in the imprisonment of Eugenio Hidalgo, the former mayor of Andratx.
Despite Bauzá's best intentions, it never seems to end, and it was the Andratx case that opened the floodgates to everything that followed - to Matas, to Munar, to Urdangarin. Matas and now Munar have fallen and been ruined. One to go maybe. But how many more might there still be?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
If Cañellas is the patriarch of democracy in a Balearics style, then Maria Antònia Munar is the matriarch. There at the birth of a new party, the Unió Mallorquina, in 1982, Mother Munar went on to become its leader, the president of the Council of Mallorca and the speaker of the Balearics parliament. She has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison.
The detail of the case against Munar is of little importance. It is the charges that were brought that are. Perverting the course of justice, fraud, falsification of documents, embezzlement of public funds. The charges are almost always the same and they always amount to the same thing: corruption.
There will not be sympathy for Munar. She treated the UM as her fiefdom and dispensed patronage as it suited her. Miguel Nadal, a former tourism minister, and himself sentenced to two years and seven months, owed his succession to leadership of the party to Mother. During a fractious campaign to decide the successor, Nadal at one point threw a hissy fit, withdrew, but was then brought back and anointed by Munar.
This was an example of how Palma dominated UM affairs. Nadal was a Palma man and virtually everything that has since emerged that was corrupt about the UM had to do with Palma. Miguel Llompart, formerly the UM mayor of Alcúdia, once told me that the corruption was all a Palma affair. It wasn't completely, but Palma or not, it had the effect of bringing down an entire political party, now named the Convergència.
Another of those who owed his position to Munar was another ex-tourism minister, Francesc Buils, condemned to three years inside in connection with a different case. Buils, it would seem, just did as he was told. And since sentence was passed on him, a further investigation has been opened up - one to do with alleged irregular payments for coastal cleaning operations under the auspices of Buils' tourism ministry. One of the strangest aspects of this is why the tourism ministry ever got involved in such operations. They had been the responsibility of the environment ministry and yet, for no obviously good reason, they were transferred to tourism. The police are keen to know why. The tourism ministry was to become the focal point for the wave of corruption cases that engulfed the UM.
Munar was widely disliked. One Spanish journalist once headlined an article about her "the most hated woman in Mallorca's history". She is an example of the maxim of all power corrupts, and she was all-powerful, seemingly stripped of principles. I once described her thus: "a Cruella de Vil who has kidnapped a doe-eyed and naïve democracy and bundled it into the back of an official limo, secreted inside a massive wedge of cash". The reference to the cash is to 300,000 euros Munar is supposed to have handed over to Nadal when she was president of the Council.
In March 2010, in an interview with IB3, Munar said that "democracy is based on the confidence that people have in the institutions and politicians, and when this confidence is lost a dictator can emerge". She was absolutely right but a court has proven that she was not righteous. She was a product of the new democracy that, despite the veneer of free political association and the ballot box, still behaved with some of the mores of dictatorship, not least the elevation of the seemingly all-powerful.
President Bauzá is to be applauded in his attempts to rid local politics of corruption. At a time when the deeply worrying voice of the military is expressing its discontent with the political class (clear echoes of the 1930s), the president must be aghast that José Maria Rodríguez, the national delegate to the Balearics, has been forced to resign over corruption allegations that date back to the Matas presidency. Yet, though these allegations relate to a separate case, Rodríguez, when interior minister, was implicated in the Andratx case that resulted in the imprisonment of Eugenio Hidalgo, the former mayor of Andratx.
Despite Bauzá's best intentions, it never seems to end, and it was the Andratx case that opened the floodgates to everything that followed - to Matas, to Munar, to Urdangarin. Matas and now Munar have fallen and been ruined. One to go maybe. But how many more might there still be?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Kiss And Make-Up: No chance - corruption cases continue
The corruption cases involving leading members of the Unió Mallorquina party continue to astound. There are now two former tourism ministers in the frame - Francesc Buils has been indicted, to add to Miquel Nadal. The former speaker of the parliament and former leader of the Council of Mallorca, Maria Antònia Munar, is now accused of diverting some five million euros of public funds between 2000 and 2007. There are also accusations of payments to party members from public money. The details no longer seem to matter. The scale is all that really counts. And the impression. One not of a party rotten to the core but one riddled with the maggots of decay at its very top: Buils and Nadal were very much Munar's men. They were. The canaries are singing, looking to pass the buck and deflect the accusations elsewhere.
There remains in all this sleaze and in all these allegations a suggestion that the cases are all political. Are they really? For them to be political would require some sort of set-up involving other political parties, the police and the judges. It's a nonsense. Nevertheless, there is an unease with the highly public nature of the way in which evidence is given out and in which the accused are paraded. Jason Moore, in an editorial in "The Bulletin", made a valid point the other day, one with which I agree; in essence, that the process should go ahead with greater dignity. The calls for sentences that come from the prosecutors before the full judicial procedure has been gone through are as unpleasant as they are presumptive of guilt.
This said, the magnitude of the charges, and also those levelled against the former president of the regional government, Jaume Matas (Partido Popular), are such that highly public displays might be said to be necessary. The corruption cases are that serious that they do threaten an undermining of the democratic system. One cannot overstate the significance of what is taking place in Mallorca at present. I have wondered if I have overplayed all this myself in invoking the past - the Franco past. I don't know that I have, but I wouldn't necessarily have expected support for this from ... Maria Antònia Munar. In an interview with the IB3 television station yesterday, she declared her complete innocence and went on to say that "democracy is based on the confidence that people have in the institutions and politicians, and when this confidence is lost a dictator can emerge". She is not wrong, but some might detect a touch of dissembling - allegedly.
So seriously are the cases being taken that the central government's justice ministry has authorised a reinforcement of the anti-corruption investigation unit in the Balearics. Fifty-five prosecutors are on their way to augment its numbers. 55! The Balearics delegate to the central government has had to ask for police reinforcements because so many officers are involved in examining the evidence associated with the different cases. It is a staggering situation.
Among the various accusations being made is one by the judge presiding over the so-called "caso Maquillaje" (the make-up case). He has accused Munar of alleged bribery. There was something rather poignant, if this is the right word, about this accusation. On the day that the judge was saying this, someone left prison. The poignancy was the photo of this person with a beret and sunglasses, travelling on what looked like a bus. Who was this? Luis Roldán. He was once the director-general of the Guardia Civil. He had served half a 31-year sentence for, among other things, bribery.
Yesterday there was another anti-corruption demonstration in Palma organised by the "Plataforma contra la Corrupción". It also had a certain poignancy. They demonstrated in the hope that the current spate of corruption cases might be the last. They can hope. They should remember Roldán. Maybe I - they - do make too much of all this. There's nothing new under a Spanish or Mallorcan sun. Not now and not, in all likelihood, in the future. But maybe the highly public parades of the accused might, just might, stop that future.
QUIZ:
Yesterday: The Wonder Stuff, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmzS9mjz_I. Today: make-up or make up, noun or phrasal verb; either way, which group kissed and made up?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
There remains in all this sleaze and in all these allegations a suggestion that the cases are all political. Are they really? For them to be political would require some sort of set-up involving other political parties, the police and the judges. It's a nonsense. Nevertheless, there is an unease with the highly public nature of the way in which evidence is given out and in which the accused are paraded. Jason Moore, in an editorial in "The Bulletin", made a valid point the other day, one with which I agree; in essence, that the process should go ahead with greater dignity. The calls for sentences that come from the prosecutors before the full judicial procedure has been gone through are as unpleasant as they are presumptive of guilt.
This said, the magnitude of the charges, and also those levelled against the former president of the regional government, Jaume Matas (Partido Popular), are such that highly public displays might be said to be necessary. The corruption cases are that serious that they do threaten an undermining of the democratic system. One cannot overstate the significance of what is taking place in Mallorca at present. I have wondered if I have overplayed all this myself in invoking the past - the Franco past. I don't know that I have, but I wouldn't necessarily have expected support for this from ... Maria Antònia Munar. In an interview with the IB3 television station yesterday, she declared her complete innocence and went on to say that "democracy is based on the confidence that people have in the institutions and politicians, and when this confidence is lost a dictator can emerge". She is not wrong, but some might detect a touch of dissembling - allegedly.
So seriously are the cases being taken that the central government's justice ministry has authorised a reinforcement of the anti-corruption investigation unit in the Balearics. Fifty-five prosecutors are on their way to augment its numbers. 55! The Balearics delegate to the central government has had to ask for police reinforcements because so many officers are involved in examining the evidence associated with the different cases. It is a staggering situation.
Among the various accusations being made is one by the judge presiding over the so-called "caso Maquillaje" (the make-up case). He has accused Munar of alleged bribery. There was something rather poignant, if this is the right word, about this accusation. On the day that the judge was saying this, someone left prison. The poignancy was the photo of this person with a beret and sunglasses, travelling on what looked like a bus. Who was this? Luis Roldán. He was once the director-general of the Guardia Civil. He had served half a 31-year sentence for, among other things, bribery.
Yesterday there was another anti-corruption demonstration in Palma organised by the "Plataforma contra la Corrupción". It also had a certain poignancy. They demonstrated in the hope that the current spate of corruption cases might be the last. They can hope. They should remember Roldán. Maybe I - they - do make too much of all this. There's nothing new under a Spanish or Mallorcan sun. Not now and not, in all likelihood, in the future. But maybe the highly public parades of the accused might, just might, stop that future.
QUIZ:
Yesterday: The Wonder Stuff, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpmzS9mjz_I. Today: make-up or make up, noun or phrasal verb; either way, which group kissed and made up?
Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.
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