The saying that some news is better understood when placed side by side sometimes works. For example, it is a fact that the Community of Madrid has purchased, through a public company, an almost 500-square-meter penthouse in the most luxurious area of Madrid, a purchase valued between four and six million euros that was made without being budgeted anywhere. The response of the president, the inevitable Ayuso, has been to play the victim once again (she stated that she is once again the victim of a "discrediting campaign"). She also offered a kind of explanation according to which this luxury penthouse will be an "office" where "institutional meetings can be held temporarily" while renovation work is carried out on another building, and that it is not clear whether she will use it. On the same day, Ayuso announced that they were opening a section on the Community of Madrid's website to "safely channel donations for the reconstruction of the Sierra Oeste," and the next day, the Community made the astonishing announcement that they will now sell the penthouse in question "to help those affected by the fires": public money is not managed like this, as if it were a child's game, nor are citizens necessarily idiots. The "reconstruction," by the way, is the word used by the Generalitat Valenciana to administer, also with notable opacity, the funds intended to repair the damage from the storm of October 29, 2024. Still during Mazón's time, the Generalitat's coffers received twelve million euros in donations from citizens who wanted to contribute to this cause, of which nothing more has ever been known. There is no news that either Mazón or Ayuso have had to appear before the justice system for the highly alleged corruption surrounding them.On the other hand, it is another known fact that, despite the resounding ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in favor of the amnesty law, and despite having granted in homeopathic doses a handful of more technical amnesties, the Spanish Supreme Court refuses to grant amnesty to the political leaders of the Procés for a crime of embezzlement that has only existed within the imagination of the accusers and the magistrates who convicted them. The call for a referendum on self-determination was part of the electoral program of the parties that formed a fully legitimate and democratic Government, and with the spending to carry out this referendum, it has not been proven that anyone profited from it. Furthermore, the then Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro, stated that not "a single cent of public money" had been spent on "the Chinese ballot boxes". By the way: the so-called Montoro case, a major corruption scandal in which the Tax Agency and the Ministry of Finance would have been used to commit extortion and other crimes, has seen the judge extend its investigation by six more months this week, a speed inversely proportional to the seriousness of the case. What we were saying: sometimes, putting news aside helps to understand it better.
