"I acknowledge them [the facts]," stated businessman Francisco Correa, leader of the Gürtel case, in the latest trial on the plot that began this Monday in the National Court. This is the main cause of a case that led to Pedro Sánchez's successful motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy in 2018, following the ruling in the first phase of the Gürtel case that convicted the PP as the party responsible for profit. The National Court sentenced Correa to 51 years in prison for leading the scheme of commissions to PP politicians in exchange for contracts with companies in its network, but also sentenced the party's former treasurer, Luis Bárcenas, to 33 years in prison, and the PP as a legal entity.

In your circle, there are honest architects who forgo speculative projects that would have provided them with generous incomes; doctors who wouldn't change the Raval Primary School for a less intense one; cooks who feed us honestly and waiters who know the names and quirks of all of us; honest public administrators who transform the city's common spaces; editors who seek out books like treasures; journalists capable of paying homage at the moment of death to the pianists who gave us life; children who help out in their parents' fruit shop and learn the ropes; people who raise the blinds very early and others who run to catch the last metro. There are also classes of young people who graduate with a brand-new future and applaud as if the room were collapsing when their brother picks up a severely disabled graduate in his arms and sits him in his wheelchair, about to collect his diploma. There are families who fight for it and teachers who make it possible. There are also conscious business people and scientists who do research, women who clean and take care of our grandparents as if they were their own, and they are all calculating how much they should pay to the Treasury.

Can you imagine having another €50 billion available each year for public and social services? It's an amount that exceeds the combined annual budget of the Generalitat (Catalan government), including the entire public sector, which manages more than €40 billion. And it's an astronomical amount, emerging from studies that attempt to quantify the cost of corruption cases such as that of Koldo García, former minister José Luis Ábalos, and the former number three of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), Santos Cerdán. According to Transparency International, a non-governmental organization specializing in the subject, Spain last year scored 56 out of 100 on the corruption perception index, which analyzes 180 countries (0 being very clean and 100 being very corrupt), that is, close to the red light and far from the best-performing countries (88) or Singapore (84).