BarcelonaThe controversial management of Carlos Mazón during the DANA storm presents numerous cracks that have left the Valencian president in a more than compromised situation. This Monday the Spanish government has even called into question the credibility of the alibi it used to justify its disappearance for hours on the day of the cold drop. The Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, does not believe that Mazón was “four hours” at lunch on Tuesday, October 29. “I don’t know where he was, but I do know where he wasn’t. He has given different versions, up to four, and I don’t believe the last version he gave,” he said in an interview on the program The mornings by RNE.
Sign up for the Politics newsletter
A look at the baubles of power
Sign up for it
Puente regretted that it was not known where Mazón was from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. “at such a critical moment” and questioned the explanations of the Valencian leader, who in his appearance at the Cortes on Friday did not clarify anything about this controversial lunch and he limited himself to saying that he arrived late at Cecopi (the emergency command center) because of the traffic.
What did Mazón do since two o’clock in the afternoon? At a quarter to eight he finally arrived at the meeting, two and a half hours after it had started. The Valencian government took ten days to explain where the president was during those hours, and gave contradictory versions. Finally several media – the Generalitat confirmed it – revealed that Mazón had lunch at the El Ventorro restaurant in Valencia with the journalist Maribel Vilaplana, as confirmed by the ARA from sources close to the communicator. The owner of the restaurant, Alfredo Romero, also confirmed a The Country that the president went to the restaurant at noon and left “between six and two-thirty in the afternoon.”
“When you give four different versions and explain that you had lunch with the employers, who denied it, your credibility sinks,” said the minister, without wanting to give more details about where the Valencian president could be at that time. Mazón and his team avoided explaining who he had lunch with on October 29, but after a few days the president limited himself to saying that it was a “private” lunch. On Thursday, November 7, he changed his version and said it was a “working lunch”, without specifying.
The next day some media revealed that he had lunch with Vilaplana to offer him the direction of À Punt. Be that as it may, this “working lunch” was not on an agenda that was blank after the meeting with unions and management. In fact, the president of the Valencian employers’ association, Salvador Navarro, uncovered another contradiction: he explained that he met with the government at 1:30 p.m. and not at 3 p.m. as the Generalitat had said, which had suggested that Mazón had lunch with Navarro.
Faced with this scenario of contradictions, the spokesperson of the PSPV in the Courts, José Muñoz, has announced that his party will demand access to the bill for the “alleged lunch” of the President of the Generalitat. “It is essential that he present this bill because the citizens deserve to know why their president was not where he should have been on the most important day for Valencians.”
Muñoz emphasized that “if it is a working lunch” it should have been paid for by the Generalitat and should be published on its transparency portal. “Mazón has the obligation to present the invoice and, honestly, I think that the first beneficiary of presenting this invoice would be him”, he insisted. And he warned: “If the PP or Mazón alludes to a matter of confidentiality, we will go to court.” Compromís has also moved the table and offered his deputies to promote a motion of censure, although to move forward it would also be necessary Vox’s support, making it unviable for it to thrive without an unexpected script twist.
The mayor of Cullera whom Mazón called on the 29th: “The tone of the call was typical of someone coming out of a dinarot”
The accusations of Puente occur the day after Mazón again defended that on the day of the DANA he was not “incommunicado” and that he spoke “even with the people who say” that he was, “like the mayor from Cullera”. “At 6:28 p.m. I called him. I was not incommunicado at any time, I have not denied any lunch”, said Mazón. Mazón’s call, however, as the mayor of Cullera himself, Jordi Mayor, revealed on Sunday, was made through the WhatsApp application, which is commonly used when the user does not have phone coverage but does have Wi-Fi.
In an interview on the program free way of RAC1, Mayor, who until now had not made this conversation public, denounced that “the tone of the call was typical of someone coming out of a dinarot”, adding that Mazón spoke in a “joking and frivolous” way . Mayor thus rebutted Mazón’s claims to emphasize that the Valencian president did not know what the situation was that was being experienced in the territory. “I don’t know where Mazón was, obviously we already know he wasn’t where he was supposed to be, and I still don’t know why he called me. He didn’t tell me anything about the emergency, he didn’t tell me that the Forata dam was at risk of breaking and he didn’t tell me anything,” he complained.
In fact, Mayor decided not to suspend the plenary meeting that he had called at seven in the afternoon in the face of the explanations Mazón had given him: “The president of the Generalitat called me and told me that in principle the worse,” he said at the start of the plenary session. An hour later he suspended it, when the alert was sent to the population, although the Valencian president had assured him that the storm had already subsided, as he had done at noon in a video that he later deleted so as not to be evidence
Hire the ex-company of Mazón’s cabinet head
If the management of DANA by the Valencian government leaves more light than shadows, so is the reconstruction of the damage. According to Eldiario.es, one of the first emergency contracts of the Government of Mazón after the catastrophic DANA has gone to the company where its chief of staff and regional secretary of Communication, José Manuel Cuenca, worked during five years Councilor Nuria Montes, who laughed at the DANA alert in Madrid and scolded the relatives after the tragedy, has signed the order by hand to the mercantile company STV Gestió SL for one of the four lots of the contract ’emergency for the cleaning service of roads and accesses of industrial estates affected by the catastrophe for an amount of 290,000 euros.
