Authors: Giles Tremlett
Some blame the Socialists themselves for, at first, encouraging financial corruption as a way of allowing the economy to slip past the bureaucratic obstacles left over from Franco’s day. ‘
Corruption
is the oil of the system. It lubricates the wheels so that they turn smoothly and do not screech. It is only necessary to make sure that it does not go beyond a certain level,’ was the theory that novelist Juan Benet later said he had heard in Felipe González’s Moncloa offices.
It was a time when money, politics and, perhaps inevitably, football became a battlefield of court cases and private detectives. Brown envelopes full of allegations against politicians and business rivals were deposited regularly in the mail boxes of journalists. This was also the era of the
pelotazo
– the get-rich-quick schemes that saw millionaires appear out of nowhere, often for doing nothing more than being the middle men in dubious commercial
transactions
. It was also the time of ‘
los
beautiful
’. These were the
champagne
socialists who swapped their ideals for cash and celebrated in an ostentatious fashion. Their leader, still an adored role-model for millions of gossip-magazine readers, was Isabel Preysler. Her main feat was to marry both singer Julio Iglesias and González’s finance minister, Miguel Boyer.
The scandals they produced were complex, murky affairs. They featured some of the noisiest men in Spain – men such as Jesús Gil, mayor of Marbella and owner of Atlético de Madrid football club, or José María Ruiz-Mateos, owner of a giant industrial and financial conglomerate that emerged from the sherry town of Jerez. Ruiz-Mateos famously dressed up in a Superman costume.
He also once tried to land blows on Boyer, after the latter had intervened in his Rumasa empire, to the cry of ‘I’ll punch you,
leche
!’ (The last word in this phrase means, literally, milk, though it also refers to semen.) Gil was also keen on fisticuffs. ‘You are a pile of shit!’, the president of Compostela football club, José María Caneda, shouted when they exchanged punches in front of the television cameras.
Both Gil and Ruiz-Mateos sought political power as they tried to avoid court cases and attempted to exact revenge on ‘the
politicians
’ who were their enemies. Natural populists, they had their small successes. These were men who, in the language of the
football
terrace or the bull ring, believed that what really mattered was to have
un buen par de cojones
– a real pair of balls. They were examples of what the comic film-maker Santiago Segura – in two hilarious films based around a character called
Torrente
– termed
casposa
(dandruff-ridden) Spain.
As the owner of first division Atlético de Madrid football club for his last twelve years, Gil was disciplined several times for insulting referees, including accusing a French referee of
homosexuality
, and inciting the club’s followers to violence. One black player, the Colombian Adolfo ‘El Tren’ Valencia, was a particular obsession. ‘I’ll kill that black man!’ he once spluttered. His
contributions
to racial harmony included ‘Spain stinks from so many blacks’. Even the paid-up
socios
, or season-ticket holders, of Atlético were not safe from his bilious comments. ‘The
socios
,’ he declared, were from ‘a low social stratus’. But that was not all. ‘Whoever doesn’t have a drug addict in the family, quite possibly has a prostitute.’ Gil was the archetype
casposo
.
Both he and Ruiz-Mateos survived their multiple
confrontations
with mainstream politicians, though not without spending time in jail or losing their bigger battles. Gil died in 2004. Ruiz-Mateos’s family, meanwhile, has built a new empire – including the Rayo Vallecano football club that is presided over by his septuagenarian wife – but is keeping quiet. ‘
Por la boca muere el
pez
,’ – ‘the fish dies through its mouth’ – is the new family slogan, according to one of his daughters. They are only missed, I suspect,
by foreign newspaper correspondents. They were fantastic copy.
While Gil and Ruiz-Mateos made the noise, the real danger lay in some more silent, subtle and powerful players. The corruption battle reached a peak when two of Spain’s biggest deal-makers, the oil-haired banker Mario Conde and Catalan businessman Javier De la Rosa fell into disgrace. For they were not content to go down alone.
De la Rosa was the son of an infamous fraudster who
disappeared
in the 1970s with the police on his heels. The son presided over Spain’s biggest-ever bankruptcy as head of the Spanish portfolio of the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), grouped together in a company called Grupo Torras. Amongst those to go to jail as a result were De la Rosa himself and Manuel de Prado y Colón de Carvajal, one of King Juan Carlos’s closest friends and his personal ambassador.
Mario Conde, meanwhile, was a clever Galician who planned to be Spain’s Silvio Berlusconi. He got worryingly close. A
brilliant
lawyer turned banker, he planned to form his own party. Then, however, the Banesto bank was taken out of his hands following the appearance of a 3.6 billion euro (605,000 million pesetas) hole in its accounts. He had pocketed at least 50 million euros for himself – and ended up in jail.
What seemed like straightforward cases of bent businessmen, however, soon became more complex. For De la Rosa and Conde both used their cash for more than just financial corruption. One of Conde’s allies, for example, turned out to be Colonel Juan Alberto Perote. He was the former military intelligence officer who had stolen 1,240 microfiches containing thousands of
top-secret
documents.
The most obscure moment of all came when Conde’s name was attached to a series of attempts, led by Javier De la Rosa, to blackmail King Juan Carlos. The two men threatened ‘to use part of their immense fortunes to oblige the monarch to abdicate under the pressure of the numerous scandals related to the people surrounding Juan Carlos’, according to the authors of a book that exposed the blackmail attempt. The two multi-millionaires were
going around claiming that ‘the Head of State had allowed
himself
to be corrupted and they had given him billions of pesetas’, according to the same book. The blackmail did not work. Both men went to jail. The ‘material’ never appeared. Considerable doubt was cast, however, on the king’s ability to choose his friends.
This became even more apparent when Prado y Colón de
Carvajal
also ended up in jail. He had also taken a large slice out of the money that Kuwait put into, and lost in, Spain. The king’s
ambassador
, who referred to Juan Carlos as his ‘
patrón
’ and claimed to be his main financial advisor, had pocketed 11 million euros. De la Rosa claimed Prado y Colón de Carvajal had been given the money ‘at the request of a high institution of the state’. In fact, one observer said, Colón de Carvajal had hidden behind ‘a cloak of disloyalty, which covered him, but had left the king naked’. A royal spokesman declared that: ‘From now on there will have to be more care about who uses the king’s name.’
Even in jail Conde continues to leave behind him a trail of corruption. In 2003 a judge was suspended for six months after trying to pressure colleagues into allowing the banker out on day release. His prison governor, meanwhile, was sacked after the
millionaire
ex-banker was found to be enjoying family visits every five days instead of the regular monthly visits given to his fellow inmates. It will be interesting to see what Conde – still rich, still clever and possibly keen to get even – does when he gets out.
Garzón believes that the corruption that marred the Socialist era had much to do with the nature of the
Transición
and Spain’s refusal, or inability, to make a clean break with the past. As a young man, he had wanted not reforma, but a complete break. He had opposed Suárez’s political
reform
referendum in 1976 (which an incredible 95 per cent of voters backed in a 78 per cent turnout), thinking it did not go far enough in burying the old regime. ‘I still think that way, even though history has run a good course and we have the constitution and our democracy. But there is too much encumbrance, too many bad habits from the past that should not have been kept. And there are blankets of
silence … Look no further than GAL, which is an
intragolpe
, a self-inflicted strike against the state.’
González himself argues that the Socialists inherited a dirty war whose roots stretched back into Francoism and put a stop to it. ‘People do not understand that the state apparatus was retained, in its entirety, from the dictatorship,’ he once explained.
Given the extent to which his last two governments were marred by corruption it is remarkable that González, when he finally lost, only did so by 300,000 votes. Had the Socialists kept their noses clean, they could have run Spain for twenty years or more. Some clearly thought they would. With the appearance of José María Aznar – a tax inspector, no less – it seemed as though the much-needed clean-up in public life would finally take place. Aznar’s glaring lack of charisma was one reason why González hung on so long. Aznar clearly belonged to the legalistic and austere vein of Spanish life. During his eight years in power,
corruption
all but disappeared from central government. It appeared to follow the flow of money, however, to where it was being spent – by regional and local governments.
It is in the construction companies that deal with these
governments
that the major fortunes of modern Spain are being made. The coming men of Spanish business – with the exception of Amancio Ortega, owner of the successful Zara retail chain – are those who place brick on brick.
If the relationship between
ladrillo
and corruption is tight, then the one between
ladrillo
and football has been even tighter. It reached its peak in the bulky, gold-adorned shape of Jesús Gil. Until recently, builders were to be found running or owning many of the clubs in the Spanish league’s first division. This is a generation, however, that is disappearing.
It is a sign of the times that the new football bosses are not the sort of men to indulge in the fisticuffs and foul-mouthed slanging matches of their predecessors. Nor would anyone accuse them of outright corruption. Spain has become too sophisticated for that. Real Madrid, for example, has become a huge, slick industry under Florentino Pérez, head of the mighty ACS construction
empire. Under Pérez it signed many of the planet’s most
marketing
-friendly stars. From Beckham to Zidane and Figo to Ronaldo, Pérez’s earliest signings set the club up as a shirt-selling machine. It also produced what became, when its multi-millionaire stars decided to play their best, an electrifying sight. It is now the
second
richest club in the world after Manchester United.
Even Real Madrid’s success, however, was due to a large dose of
enchufe
, this time of the legal kind. The signing of these players, or at least the first ones to join the firmament of what Madrid
supporters
call
galácticos
, galactic superstars, was possible due to a massive injection of cash into a club that was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. That cash came from one of the most
spectacular
real estate deals – a true
pelotazo
– Madrid has seen.
Four new skyscrapers, bigger than anything ever seen in the Spanish capital, are soon set to dominate the city’s skyline. They are being built, one beside another, on the site of Real Madrid’s
recently
demolished training ground. This is a former greenfield site conveniently located on the fringes of Madrid’s business district, known as ‘
la City
’. At around forty-five storeys each they will rise up above the Picasso Tower, a gleaming white and glass structure that currently holds the city’s record with forty-three floors.
Madrid’s local authorities conveniently reclassified the training ground’s status so that the construction teams could move in. Real Madrid kept ownership of two and a half of the new towers. Local authorities got the rest. In a single stroke, Pérez netted some 390 million euros for the club. At the same time, the local
authorities
gained seventy floors of prime office space. The circle of
private
and political interest was, once more, closed around real estate. Environmentalists complained. A Barcelona-football-club-
supporting
Euro MP even asked the European Commission in
Brussels
to investigate. It declared that nothing untoward had happened. The deal, not surprisingly, led to cries of ‘foul’ from other clubs – notably cross-town rivals at working-class Atlético de Madrid. ‘They would kill us if we behaved the way they do,’ complained Gil.
Real Madrid has always been the nearest thing Spain has to an
official, state-sponsored club. Five European Cups won in the late 1950s were treated as proof of Franco’s muscular national Catholic principles at work. The club’s ‘virile’ technique was meant to reflect the qualities of the diminutive dictator’s own regime. Even then, however, the big stars were imported, foreign players like Argentine Alfredo di Stefano. As a result, a whole new category of football supporters evolved. They are the so-called
antimadridistas
– whose guiding passion is to see Real Madrid lose. Chief amongst them are Barcelona and Atlético de Madrid fans.
Antimadridistas
claim that Real Madrid success in the 1950s was due to the Caudillo’s support. In fact, it was probably Franco who used Real Madrid, rather than the other way around. It is, however, still the favoutite club of the political right. With both the city hall and the regional government of Madrid in the hands of the Conservative People’s Party, therefore, Real Madrid was on strong ground when it tried to cash in on its land. Madrid’s Socialist leader Rafael Simancas claimed the deal was a massive gift to the People’s Party club – which gained 150 times more than the amount agreed with the Socialists for a similar deal when they ran the city. ‘They have just let Pérez have whatever he wanted,’ he complained.