Read news from:
Austria
SHARE
COPY LINK
For members

INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: ‘corrupt’ TV stars and new fake news law

In this week’s Inside Spain, we look at how corruption is so pervasive among the country’s elite that even the protagonists of Spain’s longest-running TV series have been in the dock, and how the government wants to put a stop to fake news. 

Published: 15 June 2024 13:01 CEST
Inside Spain: 'corrupt' TV stars and new fake news law
The actors playing father and mother of the Alcántara family, Imanol Arias and Ana Duato, both face tax fraud charges in Spain.

If you’ve ever watched an episode of Cuéntame cómo pasó (‘Remember When’), better known as Cuéntame, you’ve taken a big step to integrate in Spain, as it’s perhaps the most quintessential Spanish prime time TV show ever. 

The series charts the tumultuous modern history of Spain through the lives of the Alcántaras, a working-class Spanish family. It ran for 22 years (23 seasons, 413 episodes) before its grand finale last year. 

Every Wednesday, millions of Spaniards tuned in to watch Cuéntame on La 1; and the series’ stars Imanol Arias and Ana Duato are household names here. 

So it was perhaps (or perhaps not) a surprise for their fans to see them stand before a judge this week accused of evading millions of euros in tax.

“I want to stop being part of this cast, the sooner the better,” Arias told the judge before pleading guilty to five charges and agreeing to pay back more than €2 million owed in tax as well as a penalty. 

He, as so often happens to high-profile offenders with no previous misdemeanours in Spain, will not actually end up behind bars despite being handed a 26-month jail sentence.

His co-star Ana Duato is next to stand before the judge and fight her corner against the fiscal fraud charges she faces. Duato plans to plead her innocence even though she faces a possible 32-year sentence.  

The Cuéntame scandal is part of the Nummaria case, involving a law firm by the same name that allegedly helps its clients (Arias and Duato included) avoid taxation in Spain by using opaque shell companies overseas.

However, what’s most telling of all is that two TV stars who have for more than two decades portrayed a typical Spanish couple have ended up showcasing exactly what Spain’s rich and powerful often do with their money. If only they’d worked it into the series’ plot. 

On another somewhat related note, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is preparing what’s been dubbed the ‘anti-fake news law’, legislation which will fight against what he’s called la maquinaria del fango (which could be translated as the ‘mud-slinging machine’). 

Sánchez started using this term when he announced he was considering standing down as PM due to accusations of corruption against his wife Begoña Gómez. 

He ended up staying after several days of ‘reflection’ and keeping Spain on a knife edge.

But it didn’t stop his wife from being investigated (the probe is ongoing) and there is now also a case open against his brother Daniel Sánchez. 

So the timing of this new legislation seems particularly appropriate, as what the ley anti-bulos would reportedly serve to do is to give news outlets and journalists that allegedly publish fake news 24 hours to retract their comments or face legal action. 

Sánchez appears to be targeting right-wing media which in his words “dehumanise and delegitimize the political adversary through complaints that are as scandalous as they are false.”

It may seem like Spain’s PM is attempting to protect himself, his party and entourage from so-called “pseudo media” but it’s actually part of a wider plan under European law to fight disinformation, AI-generated content and fake news.

By 2025, all EU Member States are expected to have legislation in place addressing this, but it will be a difficult balancing act for both Spain and the EU for such laws to not come across as censorship and an attack on freedom of the press.

According to the 2022 Digital News Report, only 13 percent of Spaniards see the press as free from undue political interference, one of the lowest rates in the EU.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

INSIDE SPAIN

Inside Spain: Valencia’s mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

In this week's Inside Spain we look at how Valencia is releasing 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes to deal with an insect plague and how villages named after Spain's dictator Franco are ignoring a law forcing them to change their names.

Published: 22 June 2024 13:09 CEST
Inside Spain: Valencia's mosquito plague and dictatorship villages

Recent stormy weather and heat in the Valencian Community has led to a tiger mosquito plague, with these potentially dangerous insects now found in 464 of the region’s 542 municipalities.

Asian tiger mosquitoes can transmit a number of serious diseases including Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE), the Zika virus, West Nile virus and dengue fever.

Even Valencia’s health department is referring to it as an “invasion” in a new campaign in which citizens are asked to not accumulate water on surfaces, to empty pets’ water bowls frequently and to clean drains and gutters more regularly. 

In fact, Valencia’s City Council had already launched an ingenious campaign in which it released 1.3 million sterile mosquitoes that don’t bite humans, in order to mate with blood-sucking mosquitoes and produce non-viable eggs.

Tiger mosquitoes were first detected in Spain in 2004 and have become particularly common in the country’s Mediterranean regions. 

As a result of the proliferation of this alien species in Spain, a handful of dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases have been detected in Spain in recent years. 

Perhaps it’s not enough to sound the alarm just yet but the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) warned this June that almost twice as many cases of diseases caused locally by mosquito bites were confirmed across the EU in 2023 compared to the previous year (from 71 up to 130).

Let’s hope Valencia’s sterile mosquito release, which has been successfully tried-and-tested elsewhere, works. 

Insect plagues are nothing new to Spain, and whether it’s black flies or cockroaches, they tend to thrive during summer.

Unfortunately, increasingly rising temperatures in Spain are only serving to make the problem worse, especially when it comes to invasive species such as the tiger mosquito, as confirmed by the Spanish government.

On a completely different note, Spain’s Democratic Memory Law, sometimes called the Historical Memory Law, came into force in October 2022.

It’s a piece of wide-ranging but controversial legislation that aims to settle Spanish democracy’s debt to its past and deal with the complicated legacies of its Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

READ ALSO: 13 changes you may have missed about Spain’s new ‘Civil War’ law

One of lesser known clauses of the law forces municipalities named after Franco or which celebrate the dictator or fascism in some way to have to change their names (in fact, another law from 2007 already forced them to do this).

These include Llanos del Caudillo, Villafranco del Guadalhorce, Alberche del Caudillo, San Leona de Yagüe, Alcocero de Mola, to name a few. 

In case you were wondering, caudillo means “commander” and is how Franco was known (similar to Hitler’s Führer), whereas Yagüe and Mola were the surnames of two fascist leaders who carried out atrocities during Spain’s Civil War and Francoist times. 

However, most of these municipalities have dragged their feet with regard to charge their towns’ and villages’ names, either missing the deadline by which it could be done or arguing that they have no links to Franco and that their toponyms are part of Spanish history. 

The case reflects how Spain’s fascist dictatorship and Civil War legacy don’t have the same blanket negative associations that Nazism has in Germany for example, where legislation wiping all trace of Hitler’s influence has been applied more efficiently.

SHOW COMMENTS