There's
a saying in Spain: Live off your parents until you're old enough to
live off your children. I was reminded of it when reading that a
judge had told a divorced (Galician) father that his responsibility
to fund his 31 year old daughter's life extended until she both
decided to work for her living and was successful in getting a job
that paid enough. This, it's reported, "is the latest in
a series of rulings that have deepened the financial responsibilities
of parenthood in a country where children often stay at home long
after their peers in other countries have flown the nest." The father is estranged from his daughter but has been told he
has to support her at least through both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. But it's the open-ended period after that which really worries him. Needless to say, the Spanish government - which
is not big on benefits - is delighted with this ruling.
After a
mere 6 years, one of Spain's biggest corruption trials is about to
enter another phase. The investigating judge has decided to send 12
of the 40 accused for trial, and sentences of between 6 months and 125
years have been demanded for each of them. This is the list of
offences which appeared in a useful matrix in one of our papers,
identifying which offences each imputado is accused of. I can't
guarantee that the translations are totally accurate - nor how they differ - but you get the
picture. No one is accused of all of them . . .
Cohecho -
Bribery
Fraude -
Fraud
Malversación
- Embezzlement
Falsedad
de documentación - Falsification of document
Asociación
ilicita - Illicit association
Blanqueo
de capitales - Money laundering
Tráfico
de influencias - Political corruption; graft
Contra la
hacienda publica- Tax offences
Prevaricación
- Corrupt practices
Delito
fiscal - Tax crime
Apropriación
indébida - Improper appropriation
Estafa -
Fraud
No
date for the trial has been set, possibly because there's a general
election late this year and many of the accused were prominent in the
governing PP party. For an insight of how things work here in
democratic, separation-of-powers Spain, click here. Even better is
the article cited it in, which contains this (accurate) paragraph:-
It is a sign of our times that in Spain’s post-Franco
democracy the senior figures of the financial establishment enjoy
even greater immunity from the law than they did during Franco’s
brutal dictatorship. At least during the dictatorship, wayward
bankers occasionally saw the inside of a prison cell. By contrast,
today’s senior bankers hardly ever see the inside of a court
room. Indeed, the last Spanish judge who tried to punish a
senior banker for his frontline role in the country’s financial
crisis was expelled from the bench for over 17 years.
Down to earth . . . Ahead of
another trip to the UK, I went yesterday to book a slot for a tyre change. When
I suggested this afternoon a look of mixed surprise and horror flitted across the man's face. "But it's Saturday" he
muttered. "Oh, yes." I said. "Then in the morning".
"No, " he replied, "It's Saturday". As if it were
as sacred as Sunday. As I guess it is to him and his colleagues. So
we agreed on Monday.
One gets
used to all the different types of beggar in this wealthy little city
and the only ones I've ever found disturbing are the well-dressed
middle-class men who sit on the steps of empty shops - more each day
- with a placard in front of them. But yesterday there was something
worse - a well-dressed middle-aged woman sitting on the steps of a
bank. Can things really be so bad? Or is she part of a professional
scam? I won't cite a particular nationality but will say she didn't
look foreign. (Am I being sexist to see a woman begging as worse than a man? Or is begging an equal opportunity profession?)
Finally .
. . Here's a foto of some signage work being done down in Andalucia.
Not the first time and not the last, I'm sure.
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