A councilor from Vox de València denounces Abascal's party for illegal financing

The Vox councilor in the Valencia City Council, Vicente Montañez, has filed a complaint with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor for the crimes of illegal financing of political parties, document forgery, prevarication, embezzlement, coercion and criminal organization against the manager of the formation and against Ortega Smith, according to eldiario.es and has confirmed this newspaper.

The 10-page complaint recounts how the party led by Santiago Abascal, after the 2019 elections, tried to articulate a mechanism to absorb the economic contributions received by parliamentary and municipal groups from the different autonomous chambers and city councils. He claims that municipal groups were forced to open accounts where Ortega Smith was the proxy.

Montañez recounts the aforementioned meeting in great detail and even provides the audio recordings of it as proof. In it, the manager of the far-right formation, Juanjo Aizcorbe, and the general secretary, Javier Ortega Smith, ask the deputies and councilors to transfer the subsidy from the municipal or parliamentary groups to the party as collaboration agreements.

The councilor begins the complaint with the following text: “By means of this document I inform the Public Prosecutor of a series of facts so that, studied and verified, and in accordance with the provisions of Article 773.2 of the Criminal Procedure Law, proceed to the practice of as many procedures as it deems pertinent to verify the behaviors that are exposed, which could constitutively constitute the crimes of illegal financing of political parties, documentary falsification, prevarication, embezzlement, coercion and criminal organization ”.

The complainant explains “the intention on the part of the general secretariat of the party, specifically Javier Ortega Smith, and a large part of his organization, to control in the first person, through a grant of notarial powers, the account of the municipal groups. The municipal group of Valencia renounced doing it, and I have also suffered innumerable pressures for having done it”.

He recounts in the text that “the strangeness of the situation and the distrust that it generated in me and after consulting with other colleagues in the consistory as they did, I decided to refuse to open the account, not without being warned by the vice-secretary of organization Tomás Fernández that I should stick to the consequences of not complying with what was ordered”.

Despite this, he adds. “I did not comply with the order because I understood that it violated current legislation, and against the express instructions received from the economic and legal services of the Valencia City Council.” The account was finally opened, but without granting powers to Ortega Smith as requested from the national address.

But Vox continued trying to access this money through “a series of agreements through the provision of theoretical services, which were never produced, for which the party did not have the capacity in terms of personnel to undertake, and especially in the that in those cases that I know existed, there was no documentary contribution to justify where those incomes had gone.”

“We have attached an audio in which they end up acknowledging that what the party did not want was to return the subsidies and that they wanted them to benefit the party and Vox’s political project. Something that from my point of view, and I understand that there are sufficient legal grounds, is absolutely contrary to the current party financing law and the local government law”, the former councilor stated bluntly.