Cristóbal Montoro has been a powerful man within the Spanish state. He served twice as Minister of Finance, in the governments of Aznar and Rajoy, at times accumulating more important functions, such as the Civil Service and the Relations with Territorial Administrations, that is, everything related to public employees, autonomous regions, and local authorities. Now we discover, or rather confirm, that in addition to being a powerful man, he has also been a shadowy figure.
I have had the dubious honor of meeting and dealing with Cristóbal Montoro. I am a firsthand witness to his haughty arrogance and the mixture of cynicism and arrogance that characterizes him.
Negotiations with him were carried out on very sensitive issues for Catalonia. At the beginning of the century, almost 25 years ago, Montoro, then under Rodrigo Rato's command in the second Aznar government, was our interlocutor to agree on a new system of regional financing. As always, the Catalan government did the thankless job of paving the way for other autonomous regions to later benefit. All of them joined in and took advantage of the agreement led by Catalonia, except for the three regional governments led at the time by the PSOE, a party that was in opposition at the national level. Does this situation sound familiar? It's the same as the one we're experiencing now, but in reverse, with all the autonomous regions governed by the PP furiously opposed to a specific financing plan for Catalonia, which at this point remains a mere hypothesis without specifics or solid foundations.
A few years later, Montoro again became the Generalitat's interlocutor. These were the years of the financial crisis, of austerity policies imposed from the heart of Europe, of the men in black intervening in entire countries, of the threats against the euro as the common European currency, and of the extremely harsh social consequences that all this entailed. It was the era of the Generalitat, literally drowning in debt. The cuts to the regional governments, centralized everything it could, stripping away the autonomy of the Generalitat, strangled us to leave us gasping for air, and once we were financially stunned, connected us to a breathing tube, in exchange, needless to say, for controlling the flow of air that must be disconnected. Conditions that are always harsh, and always humiliating
However, the passage of time tends to be a demanding corrector of impostors. The Ministry of Finance used to favor business groups in exchange for fees for personal enrichment. That is, to put it bluntly, the use of the Tax Agency for personal benefit. If this fact is confirmed, the credibility of one of the great pillars of the State will be blown to bits.How do you expect us to pass on to you the only thing that works well in the Spanish state?Well, now we can sense that even the entity that they claim works so well may have been used for political or personal gain.
This latest episode adds to a long list of accumulated grievances, all of them increasingly less silent witnesses to practices that undermine and erode the foundations of a state. If we look only at the last fifteen years, we see the following: the police, an armed force, has been used to destroy political adversaries (Operation Catalunya); with the same desire for destruction, spied on has been carried out without judicial authorization (Pegasus case); there has been an attempt to control a decisive area of the judiciary, the criminal division of the Supreme Court, through the "back door"; a section of the judicial system refuses to apply a law approved by Les Corts and published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), the amnesty law; there is growing evidence of lawfare, that is, the use of the judicial system for extrajudicial purposes, and now added to all this is the suspicion that even our tax data can be manipulated and manipulated to suit a party.
There are situations that don't warrant cosmetic treatment, but rather require a scalpel.
