The Compromís group in the Valencia City Council registered this Wednesday the extension of its complaint to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office for the alleged appointment of officials in public institutions of the city by favoritism and has also requested an investigation into councilor José Marí Olano, who would have tried to involve the public company Aumsa. The PSPV-PSOE will also do so, according to its municipal spokesperson, Borja Sanjuan.
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The municipal spokesperson for Compromís, Papi Robles, in a statement in which she reported, highlighted two “key” elements: the minutes of the plenary session of September 25, 2024, and the audios made public in recent hours and revealed by eldiario.es, which, according to their complaint, “confirm step by step” the operation’s functioning.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is criminally investigating the Valencia City Council, chaired by María José Catalá (PP), and the Valencia Port Authority (APV) for the alleged crimes of malfeasance and influence peddling following the favoritism-based reassignment of workers from the so-called Valencia 2007 Consortium, publicly owned. Alongside Catalá, the investigations probe the alleged involvement in this irregularity of two councilors of the City Council, Rocío Gil and Paula Llobet, and the president of the APV, Mar Chao. The Prosecutor’s Office also points to four public employees. The Valencia 2007 Consortium, from which the alleged favoritism-based reassignment to other public entities originated, is an entity integrated by the Government, the Generalitat, and the City Council.
These cited documents, according to Compromís, confirm the involvement of the Major Projects councilor, José Marí Olano, as the main mastermind of this allegedly illegal operation, in which he also tried to drag Aumsa, as the coalition has learned.
Robles explained that they are no longer “talking about suspicions or isolated indications” but about “an operation perfectly described by its own protagonists.” In this regard, she highlighted that in the plenary minutes councilor José Marí Olano admits that he acted under the mayor’s instructions (“I received the mandate from the mayor to try to find a solution”; “If someone is still interested, let them tell me privately”) and stated that “it is evident that Catalá was aware of everything and ordered how to do it.”
Therefore, Compromís requests that Marí Olano also be investigated for the same alleged crimes, to which they add the crime of prohibited negotiations by officials. “This plot cannot be understood without Olano’s central role,” she emphasized.
According to the coalition, the new information points to this not being an isolated case but a coordinated strategy. “We have information confirming that Olano tried to replicate this operation in Aumsa with two more positions,” Robles indicated. “Only the internal objections of the public company prevented it,” she added to assert that “this shows it was a planned operation to commit legal fraud from within the government.”
Compromís has rejected the explanations offered by the mayor in recent hours and assured that “she is lying and trying to divert attention.” “This clientelism operation predates any Plenary motion. There is even a prior notarial record that already warned of what was going to happen,” she pointed out.
Furthermore, she recalled that the underlying problem is the management of the Marina: “While we advocated for a public model and for subrogating the workers, Catalá privatized it and fired workers, saving only those she wanted,” she assured. According to Compromís, “it is not a problem of the Port, it is a concerted operation with the Port to place specific people,” Robles specified: “Everything was prepared: when they had the positions secured, they withdrew from the rest of the processes. This is not a coincidence, it is a system.”
Given the seriousness of the facts, Robles announced that she will bring a motion to the next plenary session to create an investigative commission. “The city deserves to know the whole truth. We are not facing a minor case, but a way of understanding institutions as a placement agency at the service of the PP,” she warned. For Compromís, this case “could mark a before and after” in the legislature and according to Robles, they are “clear” about it and will go “to the end. Whoever falls.”
For its part, the PSPV will include Olano in the complaint to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office for alleged crimes of malfeasance and influence peddling in personnel placement processes, for which the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, and other public officials are being investigated.
This was announced by the socialist municipal spokesperson, Borja Sanjuan. “Councilor Olano is the same person linked to the real estate swap operations that we also had to denounce as a socialist group, where construction companies he has admitted to knowing have received million-euro awards, or who appears whenever there is a suspicion of corruption in the City Council,” he stated.
The general secretary of the PSPV in Valencia, the Government delegate Pilar Bernabé, in turn reproached the mayor for the lack of rigor and transparency. Bernabé accused María José Catalá’s government of pushing the city in just three years towards an image of the past linked to the corruption of the Popular Party and wished that “she does not bring back the shadow of corruption,” according to a statement from the Valencian socialists.
“Valencia wants to forget the times of a dark and suspicious past led by the Popular Party in the Marina, from which it had to be rescued by the Spanish government with the cancellation of the 400 million debt resulting from the waste of some leaders Catalá so much longs for,” she stated. Bernabé reproached Catalá for trying to justify her way of proceeding with the request made by the socialist municipal group to seek a solution for the Consortium workers “always supported by the law.”