On the way to nowhere

RODRIGO RATO: Has had run-ins with the law over Bankia.

Some plea bargaining

WHY did disgraced ex-vice president Rodrigo Rato and current Interior minister Jorge Fernandez Diaz meet?

They spoke at the ministry, triggering rumours that they discussed Rato’s run-ins with the law over Bankia, of which he was president, and his own finances.

It was personal, insisted Fernandez Diaz, prompting further incredulity. What personal matter could link the man who claimed that St Teresa would help Spain emerge from the crisis and a man who spent thousands at discotheques on his undeclared ‘black’ credit card?

NATIONAL parliament MPs claimed €2.6 million in travel expenses in the first six months of this year. Since the parliament chamber looks empty most of the time it begs the question of how they manage to spend that much on getting there.

A question of identity

THE Partido Popular believes it has found the weak flank of the PSOE socialists.

That flank is Cataluña, not because the PSOE is pro-independence but because its secretary general Pedro Sanchez suggested constitutional changes recognising  Cataluña’s own identity and uniqueness.   

However much Rajoy complains, the Catalans are never going to feel they are primarily Spanish first, no more than most Scots would describe themselves as primarily British.

Meanwhile Sanchez has given the PP a stick to beat him with, even though flexibility is a better way of keeping Cataluña within Spain than Rajoy’s autocratic rigidity.  

Not his cup of tea

UNLOVED former Education minister Jose Ignacio Wert hightailed it off to Paris to live but enemies are still out to smear him and, in passing, Jose Manuel Soria, the current minister of Industry, Power and Tourism.

Together with their respective spouses they allegedly had an expenses-paid holiday in a Dominican Republic hotel, invited by the owners.

Soria admitted spending two nights there, pre-paying by credit card.

Wert insisted that he did not stay in a hotel that he had never heard of in a country he has never visited.

Doubtless he should be believed: a brash Caribbean honeymoon paradise doesn’t sound Wert’s style at all.

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