Only one of the five PSOE deputies who went with 'Tito Berni' to Ramses is still in Congress

“Not 10, not 15: only five deputies went to dinner and they did so at separate tables and respecting the curfew (…). There is nothing more, nothing, zero”. This is how the PSOE settled the internal investigation into the members of its parliamentary group who had gone to the Ramses restaurant in Madrid at the request of its colleague Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo – nicknamed Tito Berni -, forced to resign last February for his alleged involvement in the Mediator case, and other people whom he presented as businessmen.

Of those five politicians who ended up acknowledging that they had attended the aforementioned establishment in the fall of 2020, when the restrictions due to the Covid pandemic were still in force, but denying any link with the corruption plot, only one has repeated on the lists of the general elections of 23-J and has managed to retain his seat in the Carrera de San Jerónimo chamber. It was the national Ferraz leadership that, through the body that supervises the “proposals” of the territories and introduces the changes it considers appropriate, forced the reinstatement of its name accompanied by the promotion of the second to the first position that in November 2019 Margarita Robles had occupied.

“It can hurt us,” the general secretary of the Castilian-Leonese socialists, Luis Tudanca, then lamented about the impact at the polls that the Mediator case could have for his party, although he added that it was “something exaggerated and false.”. His voice had also been the only internal critic that was raised in the Federal Committee that definitively and unanimously approved the 23-J candidacies to say that he felt “outraged”, “defrauded” and “enormously disappointed” by the imposition of both the head of the list in Congress for Ávila and that of the Senate for Valladolid, Javier Izquierdo.

Of the other four deputies who attended the dinner with Tito Berni at the Ramses, one of them, Uxía Tizón, would have repeated on the socialist ballot of Orense by decision of the Provincial Committee, although without obtaining a seat, since she was number three and the party only achieved one seat in the Lower House for this constituency. In this case it was the regional leadership that chose to leave out its until now national representative and the Federal Executive limited themselves to endorsing his departure.

“The presence or absence of PSdeG candidates on the lists has nothing to do with any controversy in Madrid, but rather responds to the dynamics of the party in Galicia,” sources from the party stated yesterday.. In this sense, they point out that both Uxía Tizón, Guillermo Meijón and Ana Prieto, who had been parliamentarians for Pontevedra and Lugo, respectively, “completed a stage in the Cortes and now other people entered, without further ado.”

The fifth deputy who was in Ramses, Indalecio Gutiérrez Salinas, had made his debut in Congress in February 2020 as a representative for Almería after the resignation of the former Minister of Culture and Sports José Guirao. This newspaper tried to contact the Socialist Provincial Group this Tuesday, without success, to find out the reason for its exclusion from the lists.

Involved

In the Mediator case, two socialist politicians have been arrested and released on charges: the former general director of Livestock of the Government of the Canary Islands Taishet Fuentes, who had been dismissed in 2022 due to “loss of confidence”, and his predecessor in office and uncle, Fuentes Curbelo, who was forced by the party to renounce his title as national deputy before images of him in hotels with prostitutes and drugs with the intermediary Marco Antonio Navarro Tacoronte, who gives its name to the plot, were made public.

What is being investigated in this network are the contacts with businessmen from the islands who were supposedly convinced that, in exchange for money or gifts, they would use “their influences” to obtain benefits.. The Prosecutor's Office places “at the apex of the network” Tito Berni, his nephew and Francisco Espinosa Navas, Major General of the Civil Guard when the events occurred.

Impact on the Canary Islands

The scandal of the Mediador case exploded, in turn, like a cluster bomb in the Government of the Canary Islands. Apart from Taishet Fuentes and two other former high-ranking public officials involved in the alleged collection of bribes in exchange for contracts and other types of aid, Navarro Tacoronte directly targeted the then regional president, also a socialist Ángel Víctor Torres, in an interview with EL MUNDO in February of this year: “I knew it, flat out.”

The aforementioned, in turn, firmly denied it and announced that he would appear in the case to defend his “honorability” in the face of “false statements without evidence from those who have been proven to have lied in court and are going to be sentenced as were on several occasions for violating the law. Three months later he won the elections with more votes than in 2019, although an agreement between the Canarian Coalition and the PP ended up removing him from his position.