The Spanish newspaper El Debate has again exposed President Pedro Sánchez’s habit of using the presidential plane for PSOE party events.
This time the paper forced the Spanish government to release documentation about Sánchez’s high-flying trip last March to the Dominican Republic with his wife Begoña Gomez and an additional retinue of twenty-five people, which, notably, for a trip ostensibly intended to advance the country’s foreign relations, did not include Spain’s minister of the exterior.
The trip followed the well-documented pattern Sanchez has made a habit of in his domestic travels: taking trips on the presidential plane, combining an institutional event with a party event without a clear separation of expenses between government and personal political activities in a bill ultimately paid by taxpayers. In this case, on March 25th and 26th in Santo Domingo, Sánchez attended the Ibero-America summit followed by a regional meeting of the Socialist International, which he currently chairs.
El Debate requested an itemised account of the expenses and a list of those in the presidential delegation.
In response, it received only a letter that acknowledged that 25 people accompanied the president on the trip but without explaining who they were or their official agenda. The letter stated:
The trips of delegation of the President of the Government, due to their characteristics and complexity, require organisation and execution that entails mobilising personnel from different departments and profiles and at different times and stages of displacement, in order to meet the commitments of the Government of Spain, complying with the security and representation requirements required by each performance.
Regarding the itemised bill, it read: “given the complexity of the economic processing of an international delegation trip, as of the date of this resolution, the liquidation of all the expenses has not yet been made, so there is no document or content that includes the requested information.”
This leaves it unclear to the public whether the socialist party paid for the expenses related to Sánchez’s attendance at the socialist meeting. They might also wonder how the large travel party and the presence of his wife Begoña Gómez, who is employed by a university in Madrid, furthered the interests of Spain and its citizens.
El Debate has been rigorous in its pursuit of Sánchez’s travel expenses but to little avail. This executive turns a deaf ear even to the injunction of the judiciary.
El Debate has found that in the first half of 2019 alone, Sánchez made at least 33 plane trips in Spain without having anything on the public agenda of the Presidency of the Government, and was, at the same time, seen at internal events of his party, the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE).
When the newspaper requested public information, the government first refused, calling the president’s travel itinerary a state secret or a private matter outside of its scope of documentation. A court ruled otherwise, stating, “it is hard to understand that the Presidency of the Government lacks information on the private movements of the President of the Government.”
Indeed, in the letter regarding Sánchez’s March trip to the Dominican Republic, it acknowledged that it organises the president’s security whether the trip is public or private in nature.
Still, the Sánchez government has remained opaque in its explanation of Sánchez’s obvious use of public assets for his private political activities.
