Vox Valencia, between 'lobby' and the first force of opposition to the Catalan mayor
What a scandal! Here it is played! The homage to Captain Renault's classic cynicism in Casablanca is the first thing that comes to mind when seeing the binge of unsigned headlines about Peter Lim's ties to KPMG. For this pen, the strange thing would be that at this point in the Singapore tycoon's career there were no ties with this big four consultancy. It's what it's like to move in certain areas, that you kick a stone and you get a bill or you meet at a cocktail party with one of your associates.. Look at the other three: Ernst & Young (EY) is the auditor of the sports limited company Valencia CF since Meriton took the reins in 2015; Deloitte was the firm chosen in the frustrated attempt to find a buyer for the old Mestalla plot that ended with the fiasco of the ADU Mediterráneo cooperative; and PwC's forensic and analysis helped Amadeo Salvo and Aurelio Martinez to lay the red carpet for Lim to purchase the club. Plenary to four.
That from those muds and other assignments, such as the audit of Wilmar International or McLaren, it can be deduced that KPMG International has councilor José Marí Olano on the payroll in order to give Peter Lim the Nuevo Mestalla urban development agreement to deceive Valencianism again It is another film in which more roles will have to be put on the table to make it convincing. Rather, what it seems is that the popular mayor María José Catalá did not measure the consequences of having swallowed with the condition of maintaining the double dedication that her part-time councilor of Grandes Marrones put in when she agreed to dress the municipal list in her lawyer's suit from the Status without resigning from the list of KPMG Legal partner in the Valencian Community.
Marí Olano, whose face has already been colored a couple of times by his colleagues in the municipal attorney's office due to the Docks issue, has become the scapegoat for the hornet's nest of economic interests that is Valencia CF. , the Royal Navy and other complex issues for which you had to arrive light if you wanted certain guarantees of armor when approaching them. Now he has no choice but to devote himself to exclusive dedication and process the leave of absence from the consulting firm that pays him to get rid of suspicions of a conflict of interest or go home and here peace and then glory. It was a matter of time before those working in the city to get their hands on the million-dollar urban planning operation found in the councilor's multiple employment the perfect weak flank to attack the attempt to negotiate and close once and for all the urban planning agreement between Valencia CF and Mestalla. the real knot that right now prevents Lim from completing the great job he landed in the city for and finding a way out of the SAD, with whose social mass he is suffering a divorce, let's laugh at the War of the Roses.
The fascinating thing, apparently unexpected, is that the most aggressive and threatening position against the signing of the urban agreement and the role of Mari Olano has come from what in principle seemed predestined to be the natural partner of Catalá, the ultra-conservative Vox group, converted into first opposition to the local PP.
Its spokesperson, Juan Manuel Badenas, has fully accepted the argument of Miguel Zorío and Marea Valencianista that Peter Lim has no water and that what needs to be done is to take away Valencia CF's status as urban planning agent and hand it over to a third party. that no one has named yet. A very complex, if not unrealizable, administrative operation that no one sees in the Catalá team and that would repeat a classic scheme of the local bourgeoisie in the history of Valencia CF: trying to stay with the business without advancing a carnation.
Saying Zorío is the same as saying the lawyer Pablo Delgado and, by extension, Francisco Camps. Whoever these days has wanted to listen to the former president of the Generalitat, pending sentencing in the trial of the National Court for the Gürtel case, is surprised by his hyperactivity (he may call on the phone a high-ranking official of Carlos Mazón who fables about the plots without urbanize next to the City of Sciences) and by the alignment of Badenas with the argument spread by the Zorío-Camps duo. They have already begun to see in the group the progressive crystallization of a lobby that manages the votes of four key councilors in the future of municipal life.. In no other way is it understood that Badenas put so much effort into demanding the management of the Urban Planning area and has placed Cecilia Herrero in Aumsa, the municipal company in charge of unblocking the main pending urban planning operations (Benimaclet or the PAI del Grao). Or that the number two of the Popular Party in the Valencian Community, Juan Francisco Pérez Llorca, had breakfast last week in Plaza Radio with “I am worried that Badenas has another interest other than working for Valencia”.
In this situation that is brewing, it is not strange that Catalá, who is also at risk of whether or not she will be the mayor who brought a portion of the 2030 Soccer World Cup to Valencia, is terrified of handing over part of the governability of the council to Badenas and Vox.. The strategy of the popular ones is inclined to create a line of resistance. Catalá has apparently already occupied the sociological spaces of Vox. She has established her image as mayor among the conservative electorate with overacting in gestures such as the entry of the Senyera into the Cathedral, the challenge to the Valencian Academy of Language with the happy accent and other signals directed at the carpetovetonic sectors of the city, even at the risk of moving away from the more moderate, secular and cosmopolitan sociology of the third capital of Spain.
But Badenas insists that he wants to touch power and resources. The battle for the municipal budgets, for which Catalá needs to build a majority in the plenary session that it does not have right now, is the first pressure trench. The mayor now has to decide whether to take the risk and leave for 2024 with extended accounts, blaming Vox for boycotting the municipal tax cuts she proposed, or surrendering arms with a peace agreement for territories. If she does, she will no longer be mayor alone. You will have a partner with your own life and agenda at your side. Yours and that of those who accompany you. With all that that implies.