The Spanish government is taking another step toward fulfilling its promise, made in the wake of the Santos Cerdán case, to eradicate corruption in institutions and businesses. The Council of Ministers on Tuesday gave its first approval (meaning the legislative process has barely begun) to the draft organic law on public integrity, which, among other things, tightens controls on donations to political parties, as well as increasing the penalties of disqualification and bans on participating in public procurement for companies involved. In addition to parties and businesses, the focus is also on the public administration. This measure stems from an agreement between the two partners in Spain's coalition government, the PSOE and Sumar, after the name of the former number three of the PSOE was implicated in an alleged corruption case. In fact, in parallel with this legislation, Pedro Sánchez's government has approved the law on interest groups or lobbyists (currently being processed in Congress). The open administration law (pending return to the Council of Ministers) and the criminal procedure law (also in parliamentary process). All of these, together with Tuesday's reform, complete the Anti-Corruption Plan announced by Sánchez last summerGovernment sources explain. The underlying, and quite ambitious, objective is to prevent the misuse of public funds and ensure that every stolen cent is returned to the public treasury.

A month after being released from Santé prison, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has published a book in France to explain his prison experience. The journal of a prisoner [The Diary of a Prisoner]. It's a 200-page book in which Sarkozy settles scores with French political leaders and talks about his time in prison. which only lasted 19 days and was full of privileges"I had climbed, one by one, the rungs of social life throughout my existence. I had just fallen ten floors in one fell swoop," he writes of his admission to Santé, the prison located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris.

A wake-up call from the Council of Europe. The latest report by the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) finds that Spain continues to fail to comply—fully or partially—with the 19 recommendations for combating corruption it presented in 2019. However, the anti-corruption body acknowledges some progress, although it regrets that these have not yet been fully implemented. Specifically, it establishes partial non-compliance for 16 of the 19 recommendations and total non-compliance for the remaining three. By 2023, six measures had not yet been addressed by the Spanish government.

The PP doesn't want the Montoro case to spill over into the party's current leadership, led by Alberto Núñez Feijóo, and they're trying to create a firewall to avoid being under its shadow, and consequently, the shadow of corruption, especially now that their slogan was "mafia or democracy" against Pedro Sán's administration. From the outset, the PP party is lamenting the man who was one of the most important ministers during Mariano Rajoy's era: "It's worrying," stated Esther Muñoz, the PP spokesperson in the Congress of Deputies, in a press conference on Monday morning. But they're also dismissing the case as something of the past, so the one who should speak out is not the current leadership, but the courts, and above all, Cristóbal Montoro himself: "The one who should provide explanations for all this is Montoro," Muñoz stated.