The PP has registered today in the Senate a proposal to create a commission of investigation on the alleged irregular financing of the Valencian PSOE in the Azud case. In this way, the popular seek to intensify the pressure on Ximo Puig, after EL MUNDO revealed that his name appeared in the notes on the agenda of the former treasurer of the Valencian PSOE, José María Cataluña.
This has been announced by Javier Maroto, spokesman for the popular in the Upper House. In this way, the main opposition party seeks to put the scandal of the Valencian PSOE in the foreground of today at a time when the PP is turning to the pre-campaign for this autonomy. Not in vain, this weekend the popular will hold their inter-municipal meeting in the capital of Turia, in which they hope to give a boost to the leadership of Carlos Mazón, regional candidate of the PP.
In addition, there is a clear link with the Senate. As this newspaper revealed, the Criminal Court number 7 of Valencia ruled in July 2021 that the company used by PSOE senator José Asensi, who served the main ringleader of the Azud plot to generate cash for payment of bribes, it was a mere cover. And for this reason he condemned his wife as a cooperator in a tax offense in competition with another of document falsification.
The Azud case broke out for the Valencian PSPV-PSOE, definitively in October, when the former manager of the Valencian PSOE recognized before the judge the existence of a box B in the party during the 2007 municipal and regional election campaigns. the elections in which Carmen Alborch and Joan Ignasi Pla tried -unsuccessfully- to wrest the Mayor of Valencia and the Presidency of the Generalitat, respectively, from the PP.
In his appearance as a witness in October before the head of the Investigating Court number 13 of Valencia, within the framework of the separate piece that investigates the financing of the PSPV, Francisco Martínez pointed directly to the former treasurer of the Valencian socialists José María Cataluña.
The plot was connected to other Valencian water scandals. When, in 2004, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero repealed the National Hydrological Plan, his Minister for the Environment, Cristina Narbona, devised an alternative plan that consisted of building five desalination plants: two in the province of Castellón (Moncofa and Cabanes), two in Alicante (Torrevieja and Mutxamel) and one in Valencia (Sagunto). For the PP, the desalination plants have turned out to be “useless and ruinous.”
And the construction of these infrastructures is being the subject of a judicial investigation for the alleged irregular financing of the PSOE through payments for advertising these desalination plants. The campaign “The sea, inexhaustible source of life” cost public coffers 7.5 million euros. The public water company Acuamed only participated with 200,000 euros and the rest was provided by an association of companies in the sector, AEDyR, which was interested in publicizing the project, according to the version defended by Narbona.
In Azud’s new piece of research, the Zagreo operation, records have been produced in Acuamed. In the PP they assure that it must be the Ministry of Ecological Transition that assumes the costs derived from the construction, start-up and amortization of the desalination plants, due to the high cost of the fees imposed on the affected municipalities that signed with Acuamed and the high operating energy costs.
The National Court has finished the investigation and now it has to be determined if the case is archived or an oral trial is held. Possible irregularities have been investigated during the contracting, execution and settlement processes for desalination works.
In the PP they believe that “with the PSOE the necessary water never reaches the Valencian Community” and that the only time they have tried it “could be” that it was “out of pure self-interest, for an alleged irregular financing of the PSOE, since the desalination plan has turned out to be a fiasco and a failure”.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
