Why is Spain so corrupt? Ask El País

Economist's Charlemagne comments in his notebook an article published in the Spanish newspaper El País entitled "Why is there so much corruption in Spain?".

My friend A. told me once that he likes The Economist but gets annoyed at its little knowledge about Spain. This post by Charlemagne unfortunately supports his opinion.

To start with, Charlemagne bafflingly states that El País is Spain's best newspaper. On what base? Why does a fact-led magazine such as The Economist step into such muddled waters as judging what is better or worse? Wouldn't have been enough saying "best-sold general printed newspaper"? Apart from this, I don't understand how Charlemagne can praise so much a paper whose editorial opinion is opposite to The Economist's.

Second, I find it funny that a researcher who publishes in El País wonders why Spain is so corrupt. He should simply ask El País' owners! El País belongs to Prisa, a company that has made corruption its main method of expansion. Prisa is a media holding founded by Jesús de Polanco Gutierrez who managed it until his death. Prisa is politically and commercially linked to the Spanish socialist party PSOE leveraging on Polanco's personal friendship with the former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González.

There are very dark cases in Prisa's enlargement and enrichment of its owners which leads me to accuse El País and Prisa of corruption. For example, the concession of the third private TV licence to Prisa's Canal+ TV station was possible by the explicit modification of the law to allow it to be pay-per-view.

Another infamous case called the Antenicidio illustrates the misuse of the political connections of Prisa to be allowed unlawful actions. In 1990 the radio station Antena3Radio takes over Prisa's radio station SER as the leader in Spain's radio spectrum. Polanco unlawfully bought Antena3Radio and then closed the latter incorporating its more that 100 stations to SER. Spain's High Court of Justice declared illegal the purchase and the closure of Antena3Radio but so far Prisa has not been made to comply with the Court's ruling.

Another example of the power exercised by El País and Prisa was the Judge Liaño case. The judge Gómez de Liaño opened a prosecution against Prisa's cable TV platform Sogecable in regards to the Canal+'s members' deposits which were diverted to Prisa's digital TV platform Canal Satélite. After the pressure applied by El País and Prisa on the government, PSOE and Spain's High Council of Justice, Justice Liaño was not able to carry on his prosecution, but he was prosecuted himself and sent to prison for prevarication. Justice Liaño was later pardonned by the People's Party government and re-integrated to its functions against the opinion of Prisa and PSOE. In 2008 the European Court of Human Rights stated that Justice Liaño had not been judged by an independent and unbiased court. But the damage was already done and Prisa escaped punishment again for its unlawful activities thanks to its media and corruption power.

There are lots of other examples of the corruption inducted by Prisa and El País, but another high-profile case was the merger in 2002 of Prisa's digital TV platform Canal Satélite with Telefónica's Via Digital. The merger agreement gave control of the merged platform Digital+ to Prisa, what was considered in Spain a victory of Polanco against the former Prime Minister José María Aznar of the People's Party, who had unsuccessfully attempted to curtail Prisa's power. The merger was allowed even when Digital+ would have (and indeed had) the monopoly on Spain's digital TV field; some feeble, temporary restrictions were imposed which Prisa was happy to accept since it was going to give them monopoly of the pay-per-view TV in Spain as well as sole broadcasting rights for all football games and many other entertainment, business, information, porn, gambling, and education TV channels and programs.

++++

In regards to the article's question, Why is there so much corruption in Spain?, well, because Spanish can be corrupt. And why can Spaniards be so corrupt? Because of the same reason any other nation's citizens can be corrupt, because some of them have power over other people that they can misuse and they will misuse it if needed to thrive in life: the use of any means for survival of itself and its offspring is the number 1 rule of Mother Nature to every living being, including humans. Bluntly, Spaniards and any other nation's citizens are corrupt because there is government and because governments are made of people, who in turn are living beings, not angels.

Solution: get rid of the government and devolve power over their own lives to the individuals.

Love and freedom.