The war between the heirs of Manuela Carmena has reached its peak this Thursday. The split mayors of Más Madrid have formalized this morning a complaint before the Court of Auditors for alleged “illegal financing” of the party led by Íñigo Errejón.
“We have filed a complaint with the Public Prosecutor of the Court of Accounts in which we say that Más Madrid has been in breach of the Political Party Financing Law since December 2020. In 2015 the law changed and prohibits accepting periodic quotas to people who are not affiliated with the party”, the councilor of Recupera Madrid Luis Cueto explained to the press.
The mayor has highlighted that while parties such as PSOE, PP or Vox “have the habit that their representatives are both members, the peculiarity of Más Madrid is that there are no members.”
In Recupera Madrid they insist that “a party that presents representatives of other parties is a coalition” and said “instrumental nature hampers the reality of financing between what is a party with affiliates and an instrumental party.”
In this sense, article 4 of said law establishes that this irregularity submitted to the Court of Auditors “is a very serious offense that can be sanctioned with double or up to five times the amount illegally collected.” According to their accounts and starting from December 2020 with a collected amount of 60,000 euros, Más Madrid could be sentenced to pay a fine of between 120,000 and 300,000 euros.
“We want a fair play, that the same rules are played, that workers are not extorted, that people’s independence is respected, that the parties stop suffocating the people who work, that this ‘revolutionary tax’ ends ‘ and if not that they join”, Cueto has summed up.
The same councilor has insisted that they want “it to be changed if there is an irregular process so that it stops being done, not for anyone from More Madrid to go to jail.” All this to verify “that none of the neighboring members of the Mixed Group pays any ‘revolutionary tax’, nor any of its five eventual ones.”
The court will have to verify whether the “mandatory” donations required from neighboring advisers and members – people who represent the municipal groups in the plenary sessions of the districts of Madrid capital – were irregular. In retaliation for those who refused to pay what was de facto a monthly fee, like the one that any member of a classic party executes, they were relieved of their posts, according to the termination letters – which ABC has agreed to – in those who communicated their dismissals and this has also been ratified by the courts in several sentences consulted by this newspaper.
For his part, Errejón has defended his position by slipping that it is a movement devised by the Popular Party. «The PP on the hunt. We have nothing to hide: at Más País and Más Madrid, public officials legally donate part of their salary. Thus we do not depend on envelopes in B or on distributing millionaire commissions to relatives », he has written on his Twitter account.
As for whether they will finally go to the Prosecutor’s Office to file a complaint against Más Madrid for an alleged crime of false documentation in the constitution of Más País, Councilor José Manuel Calvo has detailed that his lawyers are analyzing “to what extent it is possible to file a complaint and what route can have”. “If our lawyers consider that there is a basis to file that complaint, we will file it,” he assured.
Calvo has pointed out that “there is a direct implication in this alleged crime of documentary falsification, who is the one who denounces, the treasurer of Más Madrid”, the current councilor Chisco Fernández, who “denounces that this assembly has not taken place, as has been seen in published conversations.
«The question depended on whether he disdained what he transferred to us at the time and that at the time he documented that this assembly had not taken place, that the transmutation of More Madrid into More Country had been made based on a non-existent assembly . If he reneged on that, the complaint lost its solidity. The situation changes when he publicly admits in a response to a media such as in the Plenary tribune that this is so, that the messages, the WhatsApps and the information that he transferred to the councilors of the municipal group at that time is as it is. He said it », Calvo has transferred.
