The expert mushroom hunter who is also in the sights of the Civil Guard

MadridIn a week marked by the ruling against José Luis Ábalos, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's agendas and Pedro Sánchez's appearance in Congress to discuss the judicial cases hounding the PSOE, another prominent name linked to alleged corruption has surfaced. It is that of Yolanda Santos, a socialist councilor in the Soria City Council, arrested this Tuesday by the Civil Guard. According to investigators, the person in charge of the Environment and Tourism areas in the municipality may have committed irregularities in the awarding of contracts to a company to which she had been linked a few years ago.

An agricultural engineer by training, Santos's career has focused on environmental education and tourism promotion. She is an expert in mycology, that is, in fungi and mushrooms, and has focused part of her work as a councilor on promoting sustainable mycological tourism, an area in which Soria boasts of being an international benchmark. Before taking office as councilor, which she has held from 2019 to the present, she spent ten years leading the team of environmental educators at Biosfera Soria, an environmental services company specializing in nature tourism which, among other activities, organizes routes and workshops for mushroom picking.

During Santos's tenure as councilor, Biosfera Soria obtained contracts worth over 200,000 euros. These are now under scrutiny in a secret case for alleged crimes of administrative prevarication, influence peddling, document forgery, negotiations and prohibited activities for public officials, money laundering, and criminal organization. The PSOE suspended her membership provisionally on the day of her arrest, and the Soria City Council did the same with her duties as councilor. After spending a night in the cells, she herself handed in her resignation and withdrew from the party to "not harm them" and expressed confidence in the "clarification" of the facts.