The 'Abc' gets entangled with Zapatero's mortgage

Through WhatsApp, the fish dies and Zapatero is currently a good cod trapped in a network of messages that do not leave him in a particularly dignified position. However, the more than 300 pages of conversations and investigations circulating allow us to highlight worrying aspects of his role in the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra without also getting entangled in the weeds of journalistic plots. ABC opened its front page with: “Zapatero suddenly canceled a mortgage of 500,000 euros.” Said like that, the image that comes to mind is that of the man taking wads of bills out of his trench coat and placing them on the bank counter with an overbearing gesture. The newspaper, moreover, states in the first subtitle: “The amount is similar to the sum of the alleged illegal commission that the judge suspects he received for acting as an intermediary in the rescue of the Plus Ultra line.” Oh, the insinuations. Oh, oh, the juxtapositions. Oh, oh, oh, the similar things.similar.

It turns out that the former president, two days before canceling this loan, sold a house he owned for 2.1 million euros. This is information that became known the night before the newspaper went to print – when Zapatero called a La Sexta program to explain it – and which, in fact, was already known because last year El Debate had revealed this real estate transaction. On the other hand, the famous 490,780 euros on which the suspicion rests were payments spread across several invoices between June 2020 and March 2025. The judge will have to rule on the legitimacy of this money, but the newspaper brazenly suggested that ZP had settled the mortgage with tainted money, despite the existence of a sale forty-eight hours earlier that more naturally explains the transaction. Opening a Sunday front page with such a poorly founded suspicion, I don't know if it worries me more for being malicious or clumsy.