The Diplomat
Former foreign minister and current PP MEP José Manuel García-Margallo says that former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy rejected his plan to recover Gibraltar’s co-sovereignty as part of the Brexit negotiations. “The official explanation the president gave me was that it was a mess”, he said.
“I told him that naturally it is a mess, if we lost it 300 years ago, they are not going to give it back to us at breakfast time with a box of chocolates, we will have to fight for it,” the former minister argued in an interview with Catalunya Press.
In the interview, picked up by Europa Press, Margallo regrets that Rajoy “did not see the negotiation in the same terms” as he did and, when asked whether his successor in the ministry, Alfonso Dastis, boycotted the talks with the UK, replies that “he simply had a radically different line, which explains the change in the ministry”.
The former minister recalls that the EU established that no agreement with the UK on Gibraltar could be concluded without a prior agreement between Spain and the British, after which he regrets: “They gave us the right of veto and we could have done whatever we wanted. We had all the cards in our hands”.
Margallo reproaches Dastis for saying that “sovereignty was not on the table” and criticises the fact that the current minister, Arancha González Laya, has continued this trend to unsuspected extremes, according to him.
The former Popular Party minister considers that this has led to a situation in which the United Kingdom and Gibraltar get everything they want while Spain “gets absolutely nothing”.
Margallo believes that this situation can still be reversed in the European Union, which is not willing to “accept a Cayman Islands, a tax haven, on its southern border”, and warns that, if this is not stopped, the Gibraltarians will become “Spaniards who live without paying taxes”.
