Talking
about better times . . . At the height of the boom, when bank
branches were sprouting like weeds (not a bad simile, come to think
of it), the Levantine CAM bank opened a branch in Pontevedra's city
centre and advertised on a nearby window that a second branch would
soon be operating there. Well, it never did and the first place
closed down a year or two ago. And then the whole bank failed and was
bought out by another - Sabadell, I think. This would look like a
paradigm of Spanish boom-banking even without the fact that 5 of
CAM's directors are now in the dock, accused of a shocking array of
activities designed to defraud everyone else and to line their
pockets. And of causing the bank's collapse in the process. Reading
about this, I wondered why no British bankers had been arraigned. But
then I realised none of them have been accused of fraud, only
negligence. And greed. By the way, the CAM bank, like the TV
Channel mentioned above, was based in Valencia. Nationally, the city
seems to be associated with corruption of all sorts.
Elsewhere,
several people accused by an investigating judge have been released,
as it were, by a higher tribunal or through the pressure of the,
would you believe, Public Prosecutor. The most newsworthy are the 4
current and ex-executives of the national rail infrastructure
company, ADIF. The La Coruña Provincial Court has pronounced that
they have no case to answer in the case of the train which came off
the track near Santiago, killing 80 people. So the driver stands
alone in the dock. And no one who works for the government will ever
be investigated, never mind tried. I guess it saves the time and
expense (hard times) of having them tried, convicted, imprisoned and
then quietly pardoned and released.
Spain's
Minister of Education is having a torrid time. His flagship reforms
have been postponed and now he has been, to say the least,
embarrassed by the reversal of a decision within less than 24 hours
of its announcement. Apparently having taken leave of his senses,
Señor Wert announced that Spanish students studying abroad as part
of the Erasmus project would have their grants stopped immediately.
Possibly under Brussels pressure, Madrid quickly announced "Oh,
no, they won't!" (British pantomime joke). Leaving Sr Wert to
crawl away and lick his wounds. For a lot of people it will be a
cause for regret if these don't turn out to be fatal.
There
was a foto in yesterday's El País of President Rajoy being
applauded by his PP party MPs as he took his seat in the parliament. Does
this happen anywhere else, apart from China and North Korea? If not,
what does it tell us about Spanish politics?
Finally
. . . Here's my foto of an ugly percebe, or goose-barnacle.
And
here's a lot more.
I
have to admit that some people love them. But I side with those Galicians
who used them as animal food before the modern marketeers got to work and promoted them as an aphrodisiac.
Which they ain't, of course. Hence the famous complaint of Mae West to the Santiago
hotel owner - "I had 20 of your percebes
last night and only 10 of them worked."
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