Given the almost mafia-like network that Cristóbal Montoro and a good portion of his collaborators had organized within the Ministry of Finance itself, and within the Spanish Tax Agency (AEAT), some questions must be asked, even outside of or beyond the scandal of the tailored gas laws. Let's go back, for example, to 2012—still in the midst of the worst moments of the financial crisis—when Montoro decided to implement a tax amnesty that allowed black money to be legalized by paying only 10 percent. The measure was so poorly conceived and substantiated that it was ultimately overturned even by a Constitutional Court with a conservative majority. Then, with his eloquence and arrogance, Montoro tried to justify himself by saying that what he had wanted was to extract "little fish"on the surface, that is, to bring out evaded capital. And that (their words) "without a minimally attractive lure, the little fish They're going somewhere else." In other words, Montoro was willing to make concessions to the big tax evaders in order to compete with the tax havens. These were the final days of Rajoy's term (not Aznar's), shortly before and shortly after the 1-O referendum: the ministers of that government made statements, like four ministers could start singing the fascist anthem. The boyfriend of death as the Legion passed through the Holy Week processions in Seville, just as Rajoy himself could appear before a court of the National Court to provide a notoriously false witness about the Gürtel plot, with a sarcastic gesture.
It would also be interesting to know what role Montoro and the AEAT played in the prolonged cover-up of tax fraud perpetrated by King Juan Carlos I (necessarily with the knowledge of the Crown and the Spanish government). It doesn't seem out of place to assume that the head of the defrauding state was not exactly a minnow, but a big fish that had to be allowed to swim ostentatiously in the turbulent waters of Spanish democratic institutions. Which minnows were they that never wanted to surface? What exactly was the bait that Montoro was holding them on—besides the minimum rate of ten percent defrauded?
Three months ago, Montoro testified before the commission of inquiry into Operation Catalunya, with a display of bad manners that bordered on self-caricature. He said the only Operation Catalunya he knew about was what he called the "rescue" of the Generalitat's accounts, in 2017. Now we know that his corruption, and that of his Economic Team office, spanned the Aznar and Rajoy governments. Now that we've mentioned them, two little-known facts are the reasons for the enrichment and increase in the assets of the Aznar-Botella couple during their years in the political spotlight, and afterward. And also, who the hell could be the Mr. Rajoy who appeared in Bárcenas's notebooks?
