I really don’t want to write another article about Pedro Sánchez.
In fact, I’ve been avoiding Spanish news for most of the week, because I don’t want to spend any more time hearing about that guy.
But few things have aged as well as the article I wrote a few months ago, in which I explained the several reasons for Sánchez’s unpopularity among fifty-plus percent of Spanish voters.
Since then things have only gotten worse.
Sánchez now finds himself surrounded by corruption scandals on all sides… It’s in his PSOE party, among his closest friends, and even his family. But he’s hanging in there, pretending like he never knew anything.
Welcome to another issue of Mr Chorizo’s “Random Thoughts” newsletter from beautiful Barcelona, Spain.
Today we’ve got Pedro Sánchez and the socialist government’s corruption, the fashion mogul who fell off a mountain, and the World Cup, coming soon to the North American continent, and to a neighborhood bar near you.
Ready? Let’s go…
Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE – a criminal organization?
Since I don’t want to write about this guy, or talk about this guy, or read about this guy, or think about this guy, I’m just going to give you the briefest of summaries here.
Pedro Sánchez’s brother is currently on trial out in Badajoz. Allegedly he was given a made-up government job in Extremadura just because he’s the President’s family.
Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, is soon going on trial for private corruption and influence peddling in Madrid.
And – the story that blew up Spanish socialism a couple of weeks ago – former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero now stands accused of doing his own influence peddling in the bailout of an airline called Plus Ultra.
It looks like he might have charged a fee of around a million euros in exchange for his “services” lobbying the government for the bailout.
Since that story broke, there have been further investigations into Zapatero’s shady business contacts in China and Venezuela. There’s the usual network of shell companies in various tax havens. Police searched his office, finding a safe full of expensive jewels.
Plus, Zapatero’s two daughters apparently run a marketing agency that gets paid hundreds of thousands of euros to make up reports for people doing business with the ex-president.
Meanwhile, the PSOE has been paying former militant member (and now journalist) Leire Díez to discredit judges and police investigators looking into the party’s various dealings. It all looks pretty bad. But I don’t know if Sánchez is going to resign, or if the Spanish justice system is going to be able to put anyone in prison.
A lot of the evidence here seems like it’s coded text messages and vague voice recordings – it might take a decade for anything real to come out of the cases. And maybe it’s all legal-grey-area lobbying. I don’t know.
Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo is dithering around saying he might do a vote of no confidence eventually. The PSOE’s popularity is in free fall, but for now the general election date is next year, in the summer of 2027.
It is worth mentioning that all this is eerily similar to how Sánchez himself got into office in 2017. Back then it was Mariano Rajoy who was surrounded by corruption scandals – Rajoy left office after a moción de censura orchestrated by Sánchez.
So Sánchez may be gone soon. Or not.
Either way, I find it a bit depressing that this is the caliber of people we have running my adopted home country.
Isak Andic – the fashion mogul who fell off a mountain
Here’s antoher story that’s making headlines recently.
In December of 2024 Isak Andic, founder of the Mango fashion empire, was walking with his son on Montserrat, a very impressive (and culturally important) mountain here in Catalonia.
Somehow, during the walk, Andic (the father) fell to his death. And now, a year and a half later, his son Jonathan has been arrested on suspicion of murder.
News outlets wrote about the (alleged) turbulent relationship between father and son, claiming that Jonathan was obsessed with money, and angry that his father was planning to give his inheritance to a charitable foundation.
According to the prosecutors, the hiking trail was easy, and there was only one point on the route where someone could fall down a cliff face. Scuff marks found at the scene look intentional, rather than spontaneous, and the wounds on Andic’s body look (according to forensics experts) more like the result of being pushed than of an accidental fall.
Moreover, Andic Junior’s car was seen in the area multiple times in the days leading up to the fateful father-son outing… almost as if he were scouting the route, for some reason.
Jonathan Andic has all the best lawyers on his defense team, of course, and they’ve come up with evidence of their own. A 2024 security-camera video of Isak Andic stumbling and falling spectacularly due to osteoarthritis in his knees seems to be the main thing.
The rest of the evidence against their client, they’re saying, is circumstantial: Andic’s phone was stolen on a trip to Ecuador, which is why he can’t produce his WhatsApp messaging history for the weeks leading up to the accident.
Those scuff marks on the trail could have been made by anyone – police never roped off the area. Etc.
It’s all quite a drama. And enough to create a lot of doubt as to what happened out there on the mountain. I bet some Spanish person is already working on a Netflix special about it.
Soon after his father’s fall, Jonathan was named president of the family’s holding companies. He was also Vice President of Mango. It’s the usual rich family thing – holding companies that own other holding companies, that all rent real estate from each other. (It looks as if he’s now stepped back from the company temporarily.)
Still, the Mango board of directors trusts that he’ll be cleared of all charges.
Presumption of Innocence and Reasonable Doubt in Spanish Law
There’s been a lot of talk about the “presumption of innocence” in both the Zapatero case and now with Jonathan Andic.
But I wanted to get an expert opinion for you, so I asked Roberto de la Canal – my official legal counsel over at Continentalis.eu – if “reasonable doubt” is a concept in the Spanish legal system.
Here’s what Roberto said:
“In Spanish law, conviction requires proving, beyond reasonable doubt, that a person voluntarily committed or omitted an act that’s typified as a crime […] If a judge or tribunal can see any reasonable ‘alternative hypothesis’, where there was no voluntary action or omission […] they must not convict. The State’s burden to prove every element of a crime ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is the most important structural safeguard of the presumption of innocence and, thus, of our fundamental right to liberty.”
Actually, what Roberto said was significantly longer and more involved than that, and I’ve had to edit it down.
But that’s the gist of it.
If you’re thinking of moving to Spain (or if you’re already here) and you have to apply for a visa, check out Continentalis.eu – they do all sorts of Spanish bureaucracy and immigration processes, as well as background checks, sworn translations, apostilles, and much more.
In fact, they did everything I needed to get my Spanish nationality and they have my full recommendation.
If you mention my name – it’s Daniel – to Roberto or his partner Joanne over there, you can get a discount on your services. I’ll get a small commission as well. It’s a great way to take care of your Spanish bureaucracy and at the same time support this blog and podcast.
(Or you could donate here: buy me a coffee.)
Caso Koldo Corruption Case Continues
Now I know you’re thinking: Did I forget about Caso Koldo?
Well, not really. I was hoping to ignore it, and not write this article at all, but here we are.
So let’s do a little update on Spain’s other big hookers-and-corruption scandal.
If you remember Caso Koldo from a few years ago, it was a complicated scandal involving Socialist politicians cashing in on public contracts for surgical masks, back during the pandemic.
It was also the first time we heard about Delcy Rodríguez, now President of Venezuela – she was involved in some mysterious “briefcase exchanges” when her plane landed (illegally) at Barajas airport in 2020.
That whole thing finally went to trial, and Koldo, Ábalos, and Santos Cerdán all had their days in court.
Jessica, the former escort who Ábalos was putting up in a luxury flat in Madrid’s Plaza España, testified.
She’s now a dentist, and says she didn’t ask Ábalos where the money was coming from, or why she had a job at a public company that didn’t involve work, or even showing up. Those sorts of questions would have been “inappropriate”.
In related news, the site El Español reports that Minister of Transport Ábalos spent the whole pandemic having hookers sent across Spain to have orgies with him in luxury hotels.
The girls would be provided with papers saying they were apprentice Renfe technicians – papers signed by Renfe bigwigs. So that looks bad, but as usual, there’s nothing illegal about prostitution in Spain. And I don’t know if people’s made-up excuses for travelling around six years ago are really going to be prosecuted, at this point.
All I know is that I spent the pandemic being harassed by police for buying groceries in my own neighborhood. I’m glad Ábalos was able to have his orgies, though.
Anyway, I guess we’ll be getting a verdict on Caso Koldo, within the next few years. Don’t hold your breath.
Íñigo Errejón and Julio Iglesias – Sex Scandal Follow-up
While we’re talking about sex scandals involving famous Spaniards, I have an update on a couple of cases I mentioned in previous articles.
Several months ago, one of the top stories in Spain was about Íñigo Errejón, a far left politician (and founding member of Podemos, if you remember them) who’d been accused of sexual assault by an actress named Elisa Mouliaá.
It was all he-said-she-said stuff that happened in a locked room at a party, but it got plenty of press. Eventually, the government prosecutors decided that even if Mouliaá’s version is accurate, it just didn’t seem like a crime.
Essentially – according to her own story – she told him to stop, and he stopped. Because solo sí es sí.
It may have been a bad date, but not illegal.
Now the story, according to El Español, is that Errejón is suing Mouliaá for defamation, after she claimed that he blackmailed witnesses to testify in his favor.
At the beginning of this year, a second woman came forward with sexual accusations against Errejón, but she decided not to pursue the case because she’s a public figure who wishes to remain anonymous.
In other news, the Julio Iglesias scandal ended as quickly as it began when the Spanish Audiencia Nacional decided it doesn’t have jurisdiction over things the singer may have (allegedly) done to his staff at his mansions in the Bahamas or the Dominican Republic.
So I guess neither of those cases are going forward.
Elisa Mouliaá has expressed her disappointment with Pedro Sánchez over the whole thing, saying that Spain is “sexist, rotten, and backward”.
But like I’ve been saying for months now, she’s not the only one who’s got a problem with Sánchez and the current government.
Spain and the 2026 World Cup
To end on a completely different note, years ago I wrote an article called Is the Spanish government hypnotizing you? in which I poked fun at the idea that Mariano Rajoy was somehow responsible for the greatness of Spanish football.
The government, people were saying at the time, was using sports as a distraction. Football kept people’s minds off of the terrible economy, the corruption scandals, and the general incompetence of our leadership.
This was right around the time that Cristiano Ronaldo released his line of men’s underwear, and you couldn’t walk past a bus stop in Madrid without seeing the Portuguese player’s package prominently pictured in stunning black and white.
It was also just a few years after Spain’s 2010 World Cup victory – and the Spanish seemed unstoppable.
In the 2014 Cup, the Spanish national team was eliminated in the first round, and somehow people still didn’t rise up against the government. Perhaps they were hypnotized by Ronaldo’s bulging member.
Spain’s politicians haven’t improved since I wrote that article – and the current corruption scandals seem eerily similar to the ones from a decade ago.
But we do have new football players.
Nothing New Under the Sun
This year, 2026, the World Cup is taking place in North America: in the USA, Mexico, and (unfortunately) Canada.
According to supercomputers and mathematical models from Goldman Sachs and others, Spain is the favorite among the 48 teams classified.
(Our previous World Cup victory was predicted by an octopus named Paul – those were simpler times, I guess.)
So in a few days, corruption will take a back seat to football.
But by the end of summer, we’ll surely be back to corruption again. If not sooner.
The news media will continue to churn out content, day after day. Today’s politicians will be replaced by tomorrow’s politicians, and today’s footballers will retire to make way for the new generation. And so on.
In the famous words of King Solomon, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Cynically yours,
Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.
P.S. I haven’t watched a football match in years – it was something I only did back in the day because I was spending time in bars and trying to fit in. More on that in my recent article on being sober in Spain. What to you think? Will Spain win the 2026 World Cup? Let me know right here, in the comments.
P.P.S. Something else I don’t really have a full article on is Pope Leo XIV’s trip to Spain. He’ll be visiting the Sagrada Familia, which is right down the street from me, but I expect there’ll be half a million people gathered around and that’s not the type of scene I’m super excited about these days. Anyway, if you’d like, check out my article about Sagrada Familia and the life of Gaudí. Old Antoni Gaudí was quite a guy, and he might become a saint.
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