😰 Spain's top prosecutor is now one step from facing trial
Plus: Ayuso goes rogue, Argentina's Milei is back at it and rich foreigners keep buying property in Spain.
Madrid | Issue #106
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The accuser becomes the accused?
👨🏻⚖️ The AG is on the hot seat
The PSOE-led government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez can’t catch a break. Last week’s “plumber” scandal is… well, so last week. And this week? On Monday, we learned Spain’s Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, is one step away from trial after a Supreme Court judge said there’s enough evidence to charge him with the crime of revealing secrets.
It’d be the first time ever a sitting AG goes to trial (unless he resigns first).
It’s yet another legal migraine for the PSOE and Sánchez - who we assume at this point is running around the Moncloa yelling “fuck this shit.”
Quick recap. In 2023, Alberto González Amador, aka the boyfriend of Madrid regional boss Isabel Díaz Ayuso, was accused of tax fraud and document forgery. Ayuso is of the opposition PP (i.e. an enemy of the PSOE).
Plea deal. Hacienda, Spain’s tax authority, says he defrauded over €350,000 in 2020–21 using 15 fake invoices. Facing prison time, Amador tried to cut a plea deal with the prosecution.
The leak. Amador’s plea offer, sent via email on Feb 2, 2024, later leaked to the press - blowing up a narrative promoted by Ayuso’s team and published in El Mundo that it was the prosecution that had offered the deal.
And the leaker? Amador accused the AG of leaking the email, claiming his privacy and presumption of innocence were violated (this conveniently deflected attention from his fiscal peccadilloes). Things escalated when the Supreme Court then opened a criminal investigation into the AG.
Fast forward to this week, when Supreme Court judge Ángel Hurtado concluded that there’s enough evidence to prosecute the AG. Not only that, the judge even suggests García Ortíz acted under instructions from the PM’s office (gasp!).
‘Coordinated effort’? Hurtado claims García Ortiz asked his colleagues for internal emails to counter the El Mundo piece, then leaked one to Cadena Ser in a “coordinated effort” to shift public opinion.
Also charged. Madrid’s chief regional prosecutor Pilar Rodríguez has also been charged for forwarding the email. Investigators have found no direct proof García Ortiz leaked that email to the press but Rodríguez did send it to him that night. And then the AG wiped his phone, leaving that key night untraceable. (Sus 😒)
García Ortiz says he needed the email to prepare a press release for the morning after and that journalists already had it. The judge’s not buying it.
Not resigning. While pressure from opposition parties is mounting, García Ortiz remains defiant and refuses to resign.
Awkward. PSOE’s long-standing rule is that anyone facing trial should step down. But this time they’re sticking by García Ortiz. Maybe because they think he’s innocent, maybe because having an AG resign looks weak. Either way, they had to explain why.
So they blame the judge. The case is flimsy, they say. The claims? Hurtado ignored journalists who said they had the info before the supposed AG leak - and made weird leaps like claiming it came from the PM’s office. Maybe he’s just a bad judge. Or, hint hint, maybe (just maybe) he’s a PP partisan with an agenda.
But you can’t say that! Because if you claim a judge knowingly wrote something false, you’re accusing him of prevaricación. And that’s a crime. (Note: It is true that the Supreme Court is dominated by PP-friendly conservative judges, while the Constitutional Court is dominated by PSOE-friendly left-leaning ones. But there is a leap from having political differences to making up a filing.)
So government spokesperson Pilar Alegría chose her words very carefully. “It is clear that at this point some judges are doing things that are difficult to understand,” she said. When pressed, she doubled down: “I think the phrase ‘difficult to understand’ is clear enough. There's no clear evidence pointing to the AG. Several journalists said they got the info elsewhere, and their testimony hasn't been taken into account.”
But there’s more. "I categorically deny that there were any instructions from the PM’s office” she said. “We deeply regret that the Supreme Court made these statements without any evidence."
The PP pushed back. In parliamentary question time yesterday, PP spokesman Borja Sémper couldn’t resist tweaking Alegría. He went after her, um, cautious phrasing.
Some questions. “What's so hard to understand, Madam Spokesperson? Why is it so hard to understand the opening of a trial in the event of a possible criminal offense? Are there judges who commit prevarication in Spain? Which judges are doing this?" Alegría did not answer.
Prolly won’t matter. Ultimately, García Ortiz’s legal drama probably won’t matter. At Spain’s current judicial pace, a trial won’t start until 2028 - if ever.
More news below. 👇👇
✅ Can you answer this one question?
💬 Five things to discuss at dinner parties
1.🧨 Ayuso blows up regional presidents’ conference
The 28th Conference of Regional Presidents (aka Spain’s regional bosses) took place in Barcelona on Friday, and the sleepy political powwow quickly turned into a spectacle, thanks to a volcanic clash between Health Minister Mónica García and Madrid President Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
Wait… the what now? It’s a once-a-year forum where the PM meets with the presidents (aka governors) of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities (plus Ceuta and Melilla) to coordinate on national issues. This year? A mess.
Why? The conservative PP controls way more regions than the governing PSOE - and is demanding snap elections. So yeah… tension, gridlock, and drama. Or as we like to say: fun times.
The star of the show. Madrid’s Ayuso, naturally.
(Don’t) smile for the cameras. Things got off to a rough start during what should have been a routine protocol greeting. When García approached Ayuso for the traditional two kisses, Ayuso turned away, offered a handshake, and asked: “Are you really going to kiss a murderer?”
They’ve got history. García, from Más Madrid, was Ayuso’s
nemesismain rival in the Madrid Assembly before becoming Health Minister.But the proximate cause? Ayuso’s camp says her snub was a reaction to statements made the previous day by a Más Madrid lawmaker, who accused Ayuso’s government of orchestrating a “macabre plan that condemned 7,291 elderly people to death" during COVID, and signing their “death sentences.”
What’s that about? During the first pandemic wave, Madrid issued internal guidelines barring thousands of nursing home residents from being transferred to hospitals based on disability status.
Shocked! García appeared surprised and responded by denying that she or her party had called Ayuso a murderer. Now, it’s true they didn’t use the word “murderer”. But, they did sorta suggest it, right?
So bad they needed a chaperone. The García-Ayuso clash became hot enough that a protocol staffer had to physically separate them. And yes, it was all caught on camera (see video above).
Guilt showing through. García later took to X to call Ayuso’s reaction “disproportionate” and suggest it was driven by a “sense of guilt”.
But wait there’s more. Before the conference, Ayuso had warned she’d refuse to wear a translation earpiece and leave the room if any of the regional presidents gave their speeches in a language other than Spanish (she doesn’t agree with the whole “Spain is a plurinational state” thing).
Like this. When Imanol Pradales, leader of the Basque Country, began speaking in Euskera (aka Basque) she made good on her threat.
Offensive! Pradales, who belongs to the nationalist, center-right PNV party, said her actions were “disrespectful and offensive” to the Basque language and culture. (Other PP leaders refused to use headsets but stayed in their seats.)
Ayuso later said that speaking regional languages (like Basque, Catalan etc.) promoted separatism and that she had a right to protest by walking out.
The conference ended in deadlock (shocker), with Sánchez’s government blaming the PP, and the PP demanding elections.
But it was Ayuso’s performance that stole the spotlight.
People keep asking us, “Does she want to be the next PM?”. Our response: She’s just waiting for her moment.
2. 🛖 Housing market: Extranjeros? Sí. Jóvenes? Not so much
Youths not welcome here. Spain’s housing crisis is as famous as Belén Esteban these days (if you don’t know her yet, how dare you), but even we didn’t know it was this bad for the young (or this good for the foreigners).
How bad? As in, foreign buyers’ share of the real estate market has tripled since 2007, while the share of young Spanish buyers has dropped by more than 50%. 😱 The reason? Affordability, duh.
The numbers. New data from Spain’s notaries shows just how tilted the playing field has become. In 2007, foreigners made up 7.5% of homebuyers. In 2024? 20.9%. Young Spaniards (18-30) made up 24% of buyers in 2007. Now? Just 10.4%.
And that’s only the average. In hotspots like Ibiza (35%), Alicante (33%), and Barcelona (25%), one in four or more homes are snapped up by extranjeros—residents and non-residents alike.
This is not your grandma’s market. Unless your grandma is a Danish pension fund 🤣.
So what’s changed? A lot. Housing prices crashed after 2008, drawing in waves of foreign investment, some looking for holiday homes, others for rental yield, and plenty just for a place to live (the percentage of foreigners who live in the Spanish homes they buy has tripled). At the same time, as prices recovered—they’re up 54% since 2013)—Spanish wages… didn’t.
The result? A market where those with foreign incomes (and no need to live near a Metro stop) can afford to buy, and where locals under 30 are expected to rent, inherit or… wait (for a miracle, basically). 📉
Perfect storm! 🌩️ Albert Martínez Lacambra, director of the Centro Tecnológico del Notariado (and the guy who put together this study), calls it a “perfect storm”: low supply, high foreign demand, and no coordinated response. There’s no bubble, he insists (except for us). It’s “just a slow squeeze”.
Blame the outsiders. "It's clear that the entry of foreign buyers into the market has contributed to the issue," says Martínez Lacambra. So, there.
But don’t give up hope! Martínez Lacambra has ideas about how to fix this (i.e. “fix” in terms of helping the youths; foreigners might consider his ideas a way to “break” it).
Delay taxes. Let young buyers pay taxes like IVA or ITP over time (say, 15 years).
More loans. Expand ICO-backed mortgage guarantees for under-35s with kids.
Public housing, man. Rebuild Spain’s gutted public housing sector (2023 had just 12,300 units planned—one-tenth of 1995 levels).
Soak the
richforeign. Yes, we may have to tax non-residents more. Especially in pressure zones like the islands.
Will it work? Whether any of that will fix the problem is TBD… who the hell knows. But one thing is clear: Spain’s real estate market is functioning just fine!
Just not for Spaniards.
3. 🦁 Argentina’s Milei says he’s OK if people want to “beat up” Sánchez
Argentina’s anarcho-libertarian president Javier Milei returned to Madrid this weekend to attend the Madrid Economic Forum, a two-day event that included a mixed bag of mostly young males, far-right commentators and crypto bros influencers who got together to discuss entrepreneurship, the anti-woke movement and, for some reason, crime in Europe. Some 7,000 people attended.
He knows his crypto. Milei, who is currently under investigation in his home country for promoting a cryptocurrency scheme that ended in a typical rug-pull (google it, kids), was one of the headliners.
Party, party. As soon as he stepped into the stage (dancing and moving like a mad man), the crowd went wild and started chanting “Pedro Sánchez, hijo de puta!”, which is a pretty direct way of calling the PM a son of a whore. Milei, who never lets an opportunity to go after Sánchez go to waste, said while smiling that he was OK with the crowd “giving a beating to the local bandit”.
Unlike last year’s bilateral crisis between Spain and Argentina (in which he called Sánchez’s wife “corrupt”, this time Milei chose not to mention Sánchez by name.
Greatest hits. He did, however, give the crowd a taste of his greatest hits: he repeated that “the State is a criminal organization”, that “taxes are theft”, and insulted “the garbage media and corrupt journalists”. Oh, and he once again referred to socialists as “socialistas de mierda” (no translation needed).
No reply. Neither Sánchez nor anyone else in the PSOE engaged this time (they ended up looking whiney when they did last year). Only leftist Más Madrid called the insults “unacceptable” and asked Argentina’s ambassador in Madrid to be summoned for consultations. But everyone ignored them.
Milei also visited Madrid presi Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who also chose not to engage (or at least engage the bare minimum).
One-way love. Milei was happy to share a photo with her on his socials, but she didn’t repost or mention the meeting. Sad face.
And speaking of the right… While Milei was firing up his anti-system base on Sunday afternoon, the PP was gathering tens of thousands of supporters under the slogan “Mafia or democracy” to protest the Sánchez government (especially after last week’s “plumber” scandal).
Madrid’s Plaza de España was filled with flags, chants against Pedro Sánchez, and calls for early elections. PP boss Feijóo, addressing the crowd from a stage without party symbols, once again asked Sánchez to call for early elections and framed the PP as the defender of democracy. Since he’s
boringa moderate, he called for unity and stuff and didn’t use harsh language. Such a nice boy.Ayuso, however, got more aggressive, comparing Spain to “Maduro’s Venezuela” and warning that “dictatorships enter slowly, little by little.” The crowd seemed to love it.
P.S. Not many seemed to notice the PP event. It was the same day that Carlos Alcaraz won the French Open and Spain lost the Nations League, so there were plenty of other outlets for patriotism. Sad face again.
4. 🧱 Brexit is done! For Spain and Gibraltar, at least
The most annoying small Brexit fight was finally resolved yesterday, with the EU and the U.K. coming to an agreement over how Gibraltar fits into Europe (considering that’s where it’s actually located).
The upshot? No more fence between Gibraltar and Spain’s La Linea. 👏 And Spanish troops inside Gibraltar…
Wait, what?! Okay, we exaggerate. (Slightly). Read on…
Long time coming. For over three years, Spain, the U.K., and the EU have been locked in post-Brexit negotiations about how to handle Gibraltar, the British overseas territory/small rock that’s physically attached to Spain but spiritually tethered to a mix between a Waitrose and the Star Wars cantina.
The issue? Basically, everything. As in, how to let people and goods flow freely between Gibraltar and Spain without turning Gibraltar into a Brexit tax loophole paradise or triggering another sovereignty crisis. Casual stuff.
But yesterday in Brussels, it finally happened. 🎉 A political agreement was reached. Not just on border checks, but also on customs, taxes, flights, labor, and how to avoid another four-year diplomatic staring contest. Biggest change: The Fence (aka La Verja), one of the world’s ugliest border fences, will come down.
That is important. 15,000 people cross between Gibraltar and Spain’s Campo de Gibraltar each day; two-thirds of them Spaniards heading to work. For them, this deal could mean the end of hour-long queues, ID checks, and random closures and slowdowns (like in 1999).
There has been tension. For context: Franco literally closed the border in 1969. It didn’t fully reopen until the 1980s.
Nuts and bolts. So how will it work? Gibraltar’s port and airport will become the new Schengen border. Gibraltarian and Spanish police will do the checks.
Who checks the papers? That, dear friends, is the rub. Spain gets the final say over who enters the Schengen zone, as its police will check the IDs of entering travelers. And Frontex, the EU border agency? Out.
Sticky. This was a huge sticking point in the past. Remember when Gibraltar swore there’d be “no Guardia Civil on the Rock”? Well, they got their wish. Mostly. Or not. As in, unless you count Spanish police at the airport.
Don’t believe us. Even The Guardian warned: “The agreement is likely to come under attack from the Conservatives and Reform UK because it would mean UK citizens arriving in the British territory will have to show their passports to Spanish border guards.”
Oh, and what about smuggling? The tax angle mattered too because cheap cigarettes (barely taxed in Gibraltar) have historically been smuggled into the EU, leading Spanish customs to suggest that Spain is losing €40m a year in duties in the process.
The solution. The fix? Gibraltar has agreed to align indirect taxes (on cigarettes, alcohol, and other vices) with EU norms. Translation: no more cartons of Lucky Strikes for €10.
So are we happy? Spanish Foreign Affairs Minister José Manuel Albares, Gibraltar Chief Minister Fabian Picardo and EU trade boss Maros Sefcovic all hailed the deal as "historic", while the Telegraph and the Conservatives have already attacked Picardo for handing over Gibraltar’s boarding to the dirty Europeans. Locals? They seem relieved.
Will it stick? The legal text still has to be written. But the politics are settled (for now). And if it all holds, Campo de Gibraltar might finally get a little certainty and a lot fewer customs queues.
Here’s a first. For once, Brexit means fewer borders. At least in one sunburned, monkey-filled corner of Europe.
5. 🎤 Sónar’s artists are dropping out in droves
Going to the Sónar music festival in Barcelona this weekend? Well, you may notice that the lineup has changed, like, a lot since you bought your ticket. Why? Because, well, Gaza.
Huh? Back in 2018, Superstruct Entertainment, a company that owns some 80 music festivals, bought Sónar. Then, in June 2024, Superstruct itself was sold to KKR, the world’s largest private equity firm.
PE but something else too. Private equity firms aren’t known for their good vibes. Now add this: KKR has investments in Israeli tech and data firms and advertising networks that promote settlement tourism in occupied Palestine. In 2024, that’s a problem, especially if your audience is young, global, and politically left.
What happened? Pro-Palestine and Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) activists sounded the alarm. Over 140 artists signed an open letter. Then came the actual cancellations… first a trickle, then a flood (it’s reportedly at least 59).
Here’s one. Dania Shihab, an Iraqi musician and Barcelona resident who pulled out, put it plainly: “My performance would be morally and ethically inconsistent.”
Desperation sets in. Sónar scrambled: They acceded to several BDS demands, such as by dropping McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as sponsors, found some new 20 artists to replace ones who’d canceled, offered ticket refunds, and, most dramatically, posted a sprawling FAQ that reads like a hostage letter written by a committee of ethics professors.
So what’s in it?
Sónar “absolutely condemns the genocide” of the Palestinian people.
They say they’ve never sent a euro to KKR and never will. (We somehow doubt this, considering KKR owns them, but anyway…)
They’ve cut ties with controversial sponsors and aligned with Barcelona’s anti-military-trade stance.
They’ll donate to Gaza-focused NGOs (TBD).
They’ll host a forum on “culture, ethics, and transformation” during the festival.
Symbols of support. Yes, you can wear your keffiyeh or carry a Palestinian flag to the festival.
Will that stop the artist boycott? Unclear. But one thing’s certain: Sónar still exists. The 2025 edition just now comes with a footnote - and a massive ethics syllabus.
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