The President of the Court of Audit, Enriqueta Chicano, will present this Tuesday before the Joint Commission (Congress-Senate) the audit reports on the election campaign expenditures of the parties in the July 2023 general elections and in the 2024 European elections, in which there were counterclaims against several formations, including Vox, Junts and Se Acabó la Fiesta (SALF) of Luis “Alvise” Fernández.
In its report on the last federal elections, the Court of Auditors proposed to the Ministry of the Interior to reduce the campaign cost subsidies claimed by the parties by 208,299.26 euros if irregularities or deficiencies in the justification were found.
This decrease affected six of the parties involved in the elections: the PSOE (7,139.98 euros) and the PSC (54.85 euros), Sumar (7,418.86), UPN (11,261.46), Vox (3,915.70) and Junts, which tops the list with 178,508.41 euros.
It took JUNTS months to pay its suppliers
In the case of Carles Puigdemont’s Independence Party, it is penalized for exceeding the 90-day period in which it had to pay its suppliers a total of 1,785,084.06 euros, which constitutes a violation of the Organic Law of the General Electoral Regime (LOREG). Junts will take over the 1.99 million that the parties paid late to their suppliers. The subsidy reduction is 10% of the amount you paid late.
The same problem was repeated in the audit of campaign costs for the European elections the following year, which proposed cutting the grants requested by the Independence Party by a further €82,000.
This report by the Europeans should have been the first to analyze the accounts of MEP Alvise’s constituency, but there was no possibility since the SALF refused to provide its accounts and did not comply with legal requirements.
ALVISE refused to account for its funding
Since the Court of Auditors had not received any paper from the SALF, it was unable to decide whether its funding complied with the limits or prohibitions on donations set out in the legislation applicable to political parties.
Therefore, the auditor informed the Ministry of the Interior that SALF was not allowed to receive public subsidies to which it was entitled because it did not provide its accounts. And that according to her results she would have received 97,526.22 euros for her three seats and more than 864,000 euros for the votes received, a sum of more than a million euros.
As for Vox, the Court of Auditors warned in the two audit reports that the Hungarian bank it used to finance its election campaigns was not complying with its obligation to provide the auditor with a detailed notification of the operation to confirm that it complied with Spanish legislation.
It is impossible to know whether the Hungarian bank is complying with the law
In its report on the European elections in June 2024, compiled by Europa Press, the Court of Auditors found that to cover its campaign costs, Vox received a loan of seven million euros (6,594,956 euros after withholding 405,044 euros as a deposit) from the Hungarian bank MBH Bank Nyrt, linked to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Vox’s parliamentary partner in Strasbourg.
And in the 2023 general election campaign, Abascal’s party said it had drawn down six million euros of a 6.5 million loan agreed with the same financial institution.
But in both electoral trials, the Hungarian bank violated Article 133.3 of the Law on the General Electoral Regime (LOREG), which required it to provide the court with a “detailed notice” about the loan between 100 and 125 days after the elections, which it failed to do.
Since the court has not heard from the Hungarian bank, it warns: “It could not be proven whether the financial company is directly or indirectly owned by foreign governments and corporations, corporations or public companies.”
And the Party Financing Law, in Article 7.2, expressly prohibits accepting “any form of financing from foreign governments and organizations, corporations or public companies, or from companies directly or indirectly related to them.”
EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON THE PP
This loan was one of the elements that the PSOE used to submit a complaint against Vox to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which it filed, but in any case, this Tuesday in the same Joint Commission, the Socialists will defend a proposal that the court carry out a special inspection of the Disenso Foundation in the last five years, from 2020 to 2025, chaired by the Vox leader Santiago Abascal.
Party-affiliated foundations, even if they are private organizations, are already subject to an annual audit by the Court of Auditors if they receive public funding.
In the last ordinary audit, which referred to the 2020 financial year, the year of its creation, the Disenso Foundation declared that it had received 370,000 euros from Vox without receiving public subsidies and, according to the court, closed the year with negative equity of 78,020.23 euros.
What the PSOE is demanding is that the Court of Auditors urgently prepares a special audit report on the income and expenditure accounts of the Vox Foundation in the period 2020-2025 and “analyses the nature, origin and destination of the funds received, the accuracy of their accounting and their justification,” as stated in the document collected by Europa Press.
The initiative responds to the complaints of several former Vox bosses in the Balearic Islands who spoke of an alleged diversion of funds from factions to the Abascal Foundation, which they accuse of wanting to “get rich”. The party emphasizes that these contributions from institutional groups are common in all formations and denies any irregularities.
The final decision, which will come in the middle of the election campaign in Extremadura, lies in the hands of the PP, which represents the majority group in the Commission and whose vote will be decisive.
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