Pedro Sánchez tells Congress: ‘I never knew of, nor would I have tolerated, any of these practices’

Pedro Sánchez tells Congress: ‘I never knew of, nor would I have tolerated, any of these practices’

Spain’s prime minister appeared before the Congress of Deputies on Wednesday to address the wave of corruption cases surrounding his government, party and family.

“I am fully aware that public debate has been flooded with judicial news,” Pedro Sánchez said at the opening of his address, after briefly reviewing the latest European Council meeting and before turning to the core of his speech: the court cases involving the PSOE, his partner Begoña Gómez, and his brother David Sánchez. “I do not downplay their importance in the slightest — they are essential to understanding what is happening in our country beyond the judicial sphere.”

“It is worth bearing in mind that behind this string of leaks there are political actors who are trying to conflate issues in order to confuse people,” Sánchez added, as he set out a timeline of the Koldo case following this week’s Supreme Court rulings against José Luis Ábalos, Víctor de Aldama and Koldo García.

“These are rulings that the government respects and will comply with, as it must. In this country — the great democracy that it is — there must be no impunity for corrupt individuals, whoever they may be,” he said.

“The PSOE has not been irregularly financed,” he continued. “It is others who have exploited its resources. We do not accept that corruption is inherent to human organisations.”

Neither Sánchez nor any of his ministers made statements to the journalists crowding the corridors of the lower house. The prime minister entered the chamber accompanied by deputy prime minister Carlos Cuerpo.

On Plus Ultra, Zapatero and his family

“It falls solely to the government to clarify whether there was preferential treatment for the airline Plus Ultra — and the answer is unequivocal: there was not,” Sánchez told MPs, before defending former prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, arguing his government had not produced a single corruption case. “No one can yet draw conclusions, and the government has nothing to hide.”

“The question is not how long we are going to carry on — the question is: how could we not carry on?” Sánchez said rhetorically, drawing applause from the Socialist benches but a noticeably more muted response from his coalition partners in Sumar.

The prime minister also devoted part of his 32-minute address to the influence-peddling cases involving Begoña Gómez and his brother David Sánchez. “It is not easy for me to talk about them — because they affect the people I love most, and because I know, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that they are built on unfounded accusations and a pattern of harassment similar to what we have seen deployed in other Western countries,” he said.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo: “You bear all the political responsibility”

The leader of the conservative opposition used his 15 minutes to portray Sánchez as the epicentre of the scandals engulfing his party and family — what the People’s Party leader called the “corrupting political nexus.”

“How can we not carry on?” Feijóo retorted sarcastically, departing from his prepared remarks to pick up on the prime minister’s rhetorical question. “How can we not carry on committing crimes — is what you mean.”

Feijóo noted that the speech underpinning Spain’s first successful motion of no confidence — which centred on corruption — was delivered by José Luis Ábalos himself, sentenced on Tuesday to 24 years in prison. “You bear all the political responsibility,” he said.

The PP leader, the leading opposition figure since the fall of Pablo Casado, alternated hard judicial data — “You arrived here with 15 court cases on your shoulders; two already sentenced by the Supreme Court,” he said, referencing the conviction of the former attorney general — with more colourful language, invoking “orgies, bribes, jewels” and what he called a trail leading “from the sauna to the sewers.”

“As far as I’m concerned, we would be tabling a motion of no confidence today,” Feijóo declared — though to succeed he would need the right-leaning nationalist parties, the Basque Nationalist Party and Junts, to switch sides, something that despite their threats has not materialised.

This story is being updated.