Is Spain Actually Corrupt?
It seems like we are currently under a wave of big corruption cases that keep dropping headline after headline. It’s been quiet for some time, and suddenly there is no stopping the courts. Pandora’s box is open. So when we were discussing the topic for this Sunday’s piece, the choice was very clear.
And there’s a number that measures this properly, so let’s start there. Transparency International’s 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index put Spain at 55 out of 100, which is a slide from 62 just six years ago.
Oops.
The Ongoing Circus
Nationally, the case eating up front pages is the so-called trama Koldo, a network built around former transport minister José Luis Ábalos and his aide Koldo García. What began as an investigation into pandemic-era mask contracts turned into allegations covering road contracts, Air Europa’s bailout, and cash payments allegedly funnelled through the PSOE (the left and one of the main parties in Spain) itself.
Ábalos became the first sitting MP jailed since 1978, and several offshoot investigations spanning the Balearics, Canarias and beyond remain open.
Running in parallel and the one straight out of a detective novel: José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the former prime minister, who is not only implicated in the caso Plus Ultra, over the state’s pandemic-era bailout of an airline (a different one from Koldo’s case), but to top it all had a safe found in his office containing roughly a hundred pieces of jewellery and watches. And if you are not following this news, I strongly suggest having a look at photos of the jewels in question.
We are not talking here of a few gold necklaces; these are jewels that could easily be found as part of any Crown Jewels museum collection. A cornucopia of emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, big rocks and craftsmanship that sparkle to make you feel grey and average.
To talk numbers, an independent appraisal put their market value at 1.3 million euros; his spokesperson had put it at 30,000–50,000. Eyebrows are raised.
Zapatero has declined to explain their origin in court, though his team maintains they were gifts from a 2007 Saudi state visit… feel free to insert your meme here. The judge has now opened a separate line of investigation into possible tax fraud and smuggling.
The whole of Spain is eating popcorn with this case.
And then there’s Begoña Gómez, wife of our current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who was ordered to stand trial by jury in June on influence-trafficking and misappropriation charges tied to her university work and a business associate’s public contracts. Sánchez calls it a political strategy from the far-right, but the investigating judge says there’s enough to go to trial.
Meanwhile in Valencia
Finally, closer to home, Valencia has its very own juicy case. It leaked to the press recently: a lieutenant colonel from the Guardia Civil who ran the Comunitat Valenciana’s barracks-works budget, allegedly steering contracts to favoured builders, inflating invoices by up to a whopping 348%, then having those same builders renovate three run-down properties he’d bought with unexplained cash.
We’ve also had the Gürtel case — one of Europe’s largest party-financing scandals — run straight through the Valencian PP, where a former local party officer admitted the party had run on “dirty money.” Emarsa, the scandal around Pinedo’s sewage treatment plant during Rita Barberá’s two-decade run as mayor, ended in 24 convictions and €23.6 million in confirmed stolen public funds, though she was never convicted of anything before she died in 2016. And Nóos, the case that eventually sent the king’s brother-in-law, Iñaki Urdangarin, to prison, ran a chunk of its business through a contract for Valencia’s own digital summit.
All in all, we’d say “nothing new under the sun” (nada nuevo bajo el sol), meaning we are more than familiar with the playbook.
Answering the question
It seems very obvious that there is a genuinely recurring pattern — public contracts, party financing, construction booms that keeps producing scandals across governments of every colour and shape, in Madrid, in Valencia, and in every autonomous community alike.
That said, I believe that there are bigger, more important questions we should be asking right now, but I guess it’s too sunny and nice out there.
