The Orange Market company, run by Álvaro Pérez (known as 'El Bigotes'), organised all of the headline shows that the Valencian PP put on between 2006 and 2008.
When police searched the headquarters of the company they unearthed a network of illegal financing and black payments made by the Correa group of companies which they then christened the Gürtel plot. Gürtel is German for belt of correa in Spanish.
The money that Álvaro Pérez provided was spent in various ways: 500 euros for a magician at a birthday party, 500 euros for tools, 550 euros for a wife’s visit to a gynaecologist. 3000 euros to the dentist, 6,000 euros for a watch etc etc. The list goes on and on. It seems that many of the members of the Valencian PP were beneficiaries of this largesse. There was even 31,000 euros that went to pay for a Mini Cooper.
It appears that the Valencian PP Box B* amounted to 3.4 million euros and that 1,803,000 euros was transferred to the Box B in Madrid.
When it comes to politics in Spain, it is hard to know who you can trust. The period of the economic boom was obviously a free for all, a time when many were after as much as they could get. They clearly had no conscience about the fact they were lining their own pockets at the expense of the general public.
Now the chickens are coming home to roost and new prosecutions arise almost daily. However, the ill gotten money was spent and cannot now be recovered. A few years in the luxury of a Spanish jail is a small price to pay for what happened.
* Box B refers to a slush fund outside of the regular accounts. Unfortunately for the PP, records of these accounts were kept and have now been discovered.
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