The Auken report to the European Parliament may be above to be scuppered by a conspiracy between Spain’s two principal mafias. (I notice that PSOE-friendly IberiaNature still hasn’t got round to blogging the PSOE’s proposed long-term legalisation of illegal construction on Spanish coasts, despite its abundant condemnation of the Aznar government over the Prestige accident, which had only short-term consequences. And, by the way, the waves off Santander the other day were the largest ever only if one accepts that history started in 1990. Funny business, global warming.) (Update: There’s a roundup of the devastation caused by construction in Andalusia over at the Olive Press, and a new case of apparent corruption leading to more coastal building in PSOE Mijas.)

Tags: construction, corruption, Galicia, global warming, PP, prestige, PSOE, Spain, valencia
Categories: Buildings, Empires, rulers and warfare, Les bourgeois, The law court, The ocean

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1. A Nun
   February 13th 2009 12:38

   Isn’t retrospective action against the Spanish development mafia – most of whose money is now safely offshore – closing the stable door after the whores have bolted?

2. kalebeul » Blog Archive » Spanish judicial independence
   February 15th 2009 13:27

   [...] but who don’t see caciquism as the future, I think hope lies–as it has in resistance to Spanish bipartite toleration of construction corruption–in European intervention. The question is how far Europe will be prepared to go, or at what [...]

3. A Nun
   February 19th 2009 08:39

   I suppose one of the factors in all this is cost. The PSOE was probably hoping to blame all the illegal development on evil Anglo-Saxons and so get away with demolishing it all for nothing. However if (as things you’ve linked to imply) total value of British residential is €1300 million and 24% of it is illegal, and if the Europeans say that most of it is illegal because of a (deliberate) lack of coordination between local and regional government, the Andalusian PSOE government is going to face a compensation bill of perhaps around €300 million. Which is probably rather less than they have accumulated in Gibraltar, but still.

4. Trevor
   February 19th 2009 12:59

   I’m interested in the money-laundering angle: do the PP, PSOE, CiU etc use different accountants/entities/etc, or do they bump into each other in bank receptions in Andorra, Gibraltar etc?

5. kalebeul » Nationalism and the European elections, Berlusconi and the intra-Mediterranean risorgimento
   June 1st 2009 11:38

   [...] and PSOE are busy demonising each other for European electoral purposes, but as the disgraceful vote on the Auken report showed, they generally get along pretty well politically speaking once elected and at a safe distance from [...]