The Diplomat
Ecuador’s new ambassador to Spain, Pascual del Cioppo, said on Thursday, in an interview on Ecuadorian television channel TC, that the embassy in Madrid was paying for a time to companies that were part of Podemos leaders, such as the Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, and the deputy Rafael Mayoral.
Del Cioppo, who will take up his post at the beginning of September, said that the current president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, gave the order to immediately suspend these payments and not to pay the June and July instalments corresponding to the contracts signed with these companies.
According to the ambassador, the embassy was paying for consultancy services for Ecuadorians living in Spain who could not pay their mortgages and loans. Del Cioppo said he does not know what the advisors were defending Ecuadorian citizens from, as the government of Pedro Sánchez approved a decree last year to temporarily suspend evictions and evictions for vulnerable households that have no alternative housing.
According to the information provided by the new ambassador, Rafael Mayoral is at the head of one of the companies, the Kinema cooperative, and Irene Montero is involved in the other. “They (charged) up to 1.2 million euros per year, and in the pandemic, last year, they had the audacity to sign an annual contract for 725,000 euros”, said Del Cioppo, who did not specify how long the contracts were in force.
The declarations of the new Ecuadorian diplomatic representative, provoked the spokesman of Vox in the Foreign Affairs Commission, Víctor González Coello de Portugal, to request the appearance in the Congress of Deputies of Montero to explain the “alleged illegal payments” that his party could have been receiving from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Spain.
González considers that both Montero and Mayoral, members of the state leadership of Podemos, should be held accountable “urgently” and “present their resignation if they are unable to explain the very serious accusations” of Pascual del Cioppo.
For the deputy of Santiago Abascal’s party, the ambassador’s statements are a public denunciation of “a source of illicit and probably illegal financing of Podemos”. “In Vox we will not stop until we know with total transparency” the destination of the public money of the Ecuadorians, said the deputy, who believes that Spaniards also have the right to “the corresponding political and judicial responsibilities”.
In addition, Vox registered two questions addressed to the Government on the same issue. In one of them, it asks whether it considers that the conclusion of these contracts between members of the Spanish Executive compromises its impartiality when it comes to defending national interests. In the other, he wants to know if the Government is going to carry out an investigation to verify the veracity of the statements made by the Ecuadorian ambassador, “as they are harmful to the external image of the Kingdom of Spain”.
