Marbella, again? The ghost of the alleged corruption, which took over the city during the years of Jesús Gil y Gil, when licenses were sold shamelessly, has returned after an investigation ended with the prosecution of the husband (Lars Gunnar Broberg, paralyzed due to his state of health) of the mayoress of Marbella, Ángeles Muñoz (PP), and of the stepson, Joakim Peter Brobergin a procedure opened in the National Court for drug trafficking and money laundering.
jose bernalwho has already been named PSOE candidate for next year’s municipal elections, maintains this Interview with Public In the midst of all the noise and fury generated by the revelations of the indictment, which has been mainly telling eldiario.es in various information.
“All of us,” adds Bernal, “have been surprised, me the first, to learn that there were drug trafficking operations. How were we going to think that this network in which his family appears, in this corporate network, in the best of cases Was he dedicated to laundering drug money? I don’t think they did it once and got caught either. It has caught our attention. She has denied any involvement of her husband. She dedicated herself to sending burofaxes to the media saying that everything was false, that it was a montage. If he says so vehemently that it is a lie, then it will be a lie. He deceived us. Then we have been knowing, knowing certain parts of the summary that are to put our hands to our heads. He has been lying to us continuously. They ask him 25 million bail. When we watch the news, all this seems indecent to us at tremendous levels.”
The firewall that the PP has sought for this case is to separate the activities of the mayoress and the City Council from those of the plot. Indeed, at this time, as far as is known, there is no investigation that directly affects the mayoress or the Consistory, but there are circumstances that the Police considered while investigating the plot of possible corruption, as published eldiario.es. For Bernal, “there are sufficient elements for them to act [contra el Ayuntamiento]”.
Regarding the seriousness of the case, Bernal affirms: “Ángeles Muñoz’s husband knows that his phone has been tapped by the Udef as part of an international operation against drug trafficking. Look at the seriousness. How can you know that the phone is tapped by the Police? What country are we in? If a person with these characteristics has that information, what are we talking about at the local level?” Bernal reflects.
What do you ask of Muñoz? “That he deliver the summary. But he does not deliver the summary. We are going to carry out more procedures. We are waiting for them to respond to the appeal to the personation [el juez la denegó]. All the part that has not been wanted to be investigated, we are going to request that it be investigated. We’ll see which way. We have also requested the adjudication files from all the companies in the network, but neither [lo tenemos]. We want to know how they have been produced.” Are you not asking him to resign? “Ángeles Muñoz is not three years old, nor does the PP have a short life path to know when to leave. The PP will have to assess it.”
Adds Bernal: “I am very concerned about the fact that everything has to be framed in the judicial sphere: if they do not charge me, I have not done anything. After all, the decisions of the judges do not mean that what they have not existed “We have known what is in the summary. Those companies are what they are.”
Munoz’s Domain
What has happened in this time, since Muñoz recovered the mayor’s office, supposedly, to regenerate local politics after Gil? Why is Marbella in the headlines again? “Although there could have been signs of a recovery of democracy and the city in that year and peak of the manager’s government, some of us already warned that what came with the PP was not such. Ángeles Muñoz replaced in the forms to the different governments of Gil, Julián Muñoz and Marisol Yagüe. His electoral campaign was based not on regeneration, but on more of the same. There was a time when he was given time to regenerate the city, but what happens? It does not resolve debts with the administrations, nor private debts”.
“Muñoz -continues Bernal- did not solve the structural problems of the city and the organizational problems of the City Council. That was not solved. Then he had an opportunity with the General Plan, hand in hand with the Junta de Andalucía, but that plan was canceled in 2015. That This is the situation we found ourselves in 2015. And, when we arrived in 2015, the forces of the left obtained the majority and we found ourselves with that establishment: general plan, public debt, a structural problem of workers that we had to solve and financial debts with different banks. We started working.”
The city has been governed, in effect -since the Government of Spain dissolved the City Council in 2006 and placed it in the hands of a manager-, by angeles munoz (PP), which has won all the elections with an absolute majority since then, except those that Bernal cites, those of 2015. Then, Bernal managed to be mayor with the support of two independent councilors, from Opción Sampedreña, and from the left, from We can and IU. The project lasted two years, because, still inexplicably, in a strange motion of no confidence, Ángeles Muñoz regained the mayoralty after those two councilors withdrew their support for the left.
“Those two years [entre 2015 y 2017] implied –affirms Bernal– That people in the city know us and that they see that we are valid people. I try to surround myself with the best for this to work. We cannot prove what happened then”, says Bernal about the drastic and decisive change of course by surprise and against the criteria of his bases of the ediles. “We got along well, fantastic. One morning they begin to move a little. They begin to say – recalls Bernal: We promised that we were going to bring to the party assembly the continuity. They do it and in the assembly it wins to continue [con la izquierda]. That was at the beginning of the week and on a Friday at eleven at night they say they are leaving. Reason?…”says Bernal.
In 2019, the left was close to repeating the success of 2015, but Muñoz finally, by a handful of votes, with 40% of the votes, obtained an absolute majority. In the corporation today there are no parties to the left of the PSOE. 3,273 votes –2,000 from IU; the rest of Podemos – were left without representation due to the division of the electorate. With that same number of votes, Option Sampedreña obtained two councilors.
Indolence
Bernal is from Marbella, third generation, almost a weirdo in a city dominated by the capital, by urbanizations with intense purchasing power, in which the left sometimes has the feeling of speaking to a lucid percentage of the population, and that reverberates, for the external observer, sensations similar to those of the wildest westerns. “It is my town, it is my people. I am a high school teacher, I maintain those values. I want that city,” he says. “I was 15 years old when Gil arrived in Marbella and destroyed my city“, He says.
Do the electoral results reveal some kind of indolence in the Marbella electorate? “This city, which is mine, worries me,” adds Bernal, “none of the mayors are from here, I am from here. Every mayor that has passed since the late 1980s has used City Hall. That worries me. A month and a half has passed, absolutely everything has happened, the mayoress has [presuntamente] 12 million euros and nothing has happened here. Where did he get it from?” Bernal wonders. The reform of the Penal Code that the Government is preparing contemplates a crime of illicit enrichment: “It is not retroactive, but that is the situation. [Que] Justify where your assets came from”, answers Bernal.
