Ever-present problem of corruption

There is no need to go back as far as an­cient Baby­lo­nia, as does the Ital­ian au­thor Carlo Al­berto Brioschi in his book Breu història de la cor­rupció, pub­lished by La Cam­pana, to know that cor­rup­tion is not lim­ited to mod­ern day Spain, or even Cat­alo­nia. In a re­cent book by Josep Maria Ca­dena, Barcelona vista pels seus dibuix­ants 1888-1929, pub­lished by Àmbit, there are two car­toons, one by Joan Pel­licer Montseny and an­other by Pi­carol, that re­flect the high lev­els of cor­rup­tion that the Cata­lan cap­i­tal ex­pe­ri­enced at the be­gin­ning of the 20th cen­tury.

The first car­toon, dated 1909, shows a large lady bar­ing her breast, slumped in a chair, with peo­ple climb­ing all over her. The cap­tion below reads: pub­lic em­ploy­ees suck­ling on Barcelona. Pi­carol's car­toon, from 1910, shows the fa­cade of a neo-clas­si­cal build­ing of the Barcelona city coun­cil from which hangs a ban­ner that reads: Great busi­ness cen­tre of Don Ale­jan­dro y Cº. The Ale­jan­dro men­tioned was Ale­jan­dro Ler­roux, who “turned the Casa de la Ciu­tat into a cen­tre for buy­ing and sell­ing po­lit­i­cal de­ci­sions,” in the words of Ca­dena in his book. Also in his work, Ca­dena in­cludes a text from 1896 in La Cam­pana de Gràcia mag­a­zine that ac­cuses local politi­cians of ob­tain­ing their seats through “tricks” rather than votes, and goes on to de­nounce “the scan­dals, the traf­fick­ing, the im­moral­ity and abuses” tak­ing place at the time. With these an­tecedents, it is no sur­prise that the con­tem­po­rary his­tory of Cat­alo­nia also has its fair share of cor­rupt of­fi­cials: Bar­tomeu Muñoz (Santa Coloma de Gramenet), Manuel Bus­tos (Sabadell) or Xavier Cre­spo (Lloret de Mar) are only a few ex­am­ples of mod­ern malfea­sance.

It is clear that the cur­rent ex­plo­sion of cor­rup­tion at all lev­els has ap­peared now that democ­racy is no longer a nov­elty and when the un­pop­u­lar cor­rupt prac­tices of the Franco dic­ta­tor­ship are now fad­ing in the mem­ory. In fact, it al­most seems as if cer­tain of­fi­cials have been wait­ing for this to hap­pen be­fore going back to the bad habits of mak­ing money from pub­lic con­struc­tion pro­jects in par­tic­u­lar. What­ever the sit­u­a­tion, a link with Spain's dark past ex­ists, as can be seen from the fact that the man who in 1960 ended up in prison for ac­cus­ing Franco of cor­rup­tion should now be at the top of the list of those under in­ves­ti­ga­tion for de­fraud­ing the pubic purse. The Jordi Pujol case has, after many years of ru­mour and re­ports, emerged into the light, at a time when pub­lic trust is at an all time low and the only op­tion ap­pears to be cut it off at the root or allow it to be­come sys­temic.

The Pujol af­fair has de­fin­i­tively thrust Con­vergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) into the spot­light of sus­pi­cion, when it was thought that the party's al­lies, Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC), were more likely to be guilty of abuse due to sit­u­a­tions in the past such as the “cas Tur­isme”, in which UDC party mem­bers were ac­cused of pock­et­ing pub­lic money.

Ob­vi­ously some cor­rup­tion will al­ways exist, in­clud­ing il­le­gal party fund­ing, but the prob­lem fac­ing pros­e­cu­tors and lawyers when these sus­pi­cions are in­ves­ti­gated is to pro­vide clear ev­i­dence of links be­tween cor­rupt prac­tices and the party fi­nance struc­ture. Nat­u­rally, any­one con­sid­er­ing il­le­gal ac­tiv­ity will set up a mech­a­nism to make sure the truth of the mat­ter is dif­fi­cult to find.

This fi­nan­cial en­gi­neer­ing is what was re­vealed in the Palau de la Música case, in which hun­dreds of thou­sands of euros from the Fer­rovial con­struc­tion com­pany ben­e­fited CDC party fi­nances after pass­ing through the hands of Fèlix Mil­let, who we now know was a spe­cial­ist when it came to hand­ing out money while pock­et­ing a sig­nif­i­cant com­mis­sion for him­self.

When the Palau case ex­ploded, the Barcelona pros­e­cu­tors did not know of the po­lit­i­cal side to the sit­u­a­tion and when it fi­nally emerged in court, it would do so through a sin­gle in­di­vid­ual linked to CDC, Daniel Osàcar. How­ever, the length of the ju­di­cial process and the dif­fi­culty of get­ting to the truth is enough to make the pub­lic be­lieve that fight­ing cor­rup­tion is a los­ing bat­tle. The fa­mous 3% case, re­fer­ring to al­leged il­le­gal fi­nanc­ing of CiU through the pub­lic com­pany Adigsa that was brought up by Pas­cual Mara­gall in par­lia­ment in 2005, de­spite being taken up the very next day by the then pros­e­cu­tor José María Mena, is still wait­ing to go to court. This slow ju­di­cial pace can also be seen in car­ry­ing out sen­tenc­ing. In the case of Fèlix Mil­let and Jordi Mon­tull, for ex­am­ple, the ques­tion usu­ally asked is not how long their sen­tences will be but whether they will ever ac­tu­ally end up in prison at all, de­spite their con­fes­sions in 2009. Along with cases of cor­rup­tion on a pri­vate, in­di­vid­ual level, whether it is Josep Lluís Núñez, Fran­cisco García Pri­eto, Jordi Cañas, the Carulla fam­ily, Montser­rat Ca­ballé or Narcís Serra, the im­pres­sion given is that so­ci­ety is mired in a never-end­ing cycle of cor­rup­tion.