Corruption scandals in Spain, on the right & left parties: the Gürtel and ERE cases

During the last months, we are watching a shocking spiral of scandals in the politics of Spain. And much for the deception of any independent observer, they affect the two main parties: socialists (PSOE) and conservatives (PP).

A couple of years ago, the newspaper El País first reported about a corruption network -referred to as "Gürtel"- devoted to make contracts and get substantial, illegal commisions in all kind of events related to administrations controlled by the Partido Popular. Apparently this case had ramifications in different regions, including Galicia and Madrid, but was most prominent in Valencia, where the president, Camps, seems to be directly involved in the network.

And some weeks ago, it was reported that a big number of people who did not meet the requirements had been included in a program (funded by the local government) to retire people from unprofitable companies, called ERE (Expediente de Regulación de Empleo, in Spanish). According to reports, it seems these people included many related to the PSOE, and in many cases, they never had any relationship to the companies recipient of those ERE.

Both scandals have been growing and growing, for several years in the Gürtel case, and for several months in the ERE case.

I got interested to get some kind of comparative quantitation between both cases, and it is quite surprising. Today, Manuel Recio, current counselor of employment at the regional government in Andalucía (called Junta de Andalucía) announced the results of an internal investigation. According to his information, the ERE in Andalucía covered 5982 people, from which 72 are completely illegal (had not relationship whatsoever to the enterprises covered by the ERE) and 111 have other irregularities. In total, the robbed money is around 9 million euros. (Update: this amount seems to be severely underestimated; see further update at the end of this post).

In the case of the Gürtel scandal, quantitation is much trickier, since it involves countless contracts, and commissions, at different administrations, from regional governments to city halls.  Some calculations speak about 2000 million euros, which seems an excessive, biased calculation. The Spanish Vicepresident of the government has recently spoken about "hundreds of millions of euros" when addressing the Gürtel scandal. But having a quick look at humbers reported by specific contracts within the Gürtel network, it seems obvious that the total amount would be, at least, ten times higher than in the ERE case; in fact, some recent estimations speak about 120 million euros.

This rough calculation is helpful to put the whole situation in context. During the last months, the right-sided media are strongly hammering on the ERE scandal (with all reason), but usually they tend to forget, or at least to be overly indulgent, about the Gürtel scandal. Obviously, in the case of the left-sided media, the situation is the opposite.

But beyond political inclinations, the ERE scandal means that thieves got 9 million euros; the Gürtel scandal could well be above 100 million euros. This comparison alone is quite clear.

Update: after digging for more information, I found information at reputable newspapers suggesting that the estimations from Junta de Andalucía might also be in the scale of hundreds of millions of euros.

Therefore I have to conclude that, unless final amounts are given after judgement, both the Gürtel and the ERE scandals have roughly similar proportions.