All The Presidents: Mental

Juan Bautista Soler, 58, very much fits the image of a typical Spanish businessman. Paunchy, double chinned and with a neatly trimmed moustache, he is an enthusiastic smoker in spite of frequent warnings from his doctors. Not for him the sleek, modern, hand-luggage-only look of the 21st century entrepreneur.

He made his money from el ladrillo (“the brick”, or construction) helped along considerably by the fact that his father, also Juan, is one of the sector’s wealthiest men. Juan Jr and his two siblings are said to have received €100m each from their billionaire papa early in their careers. Like Soler Snr, he laid most of his bricks in his home region: Valencia.

In the early part of this century, Spain’s builders made hay. With easy loans, malleable planning officials, plenty of EU encouragement and no compunction to match supply to demand, they poured their concrete all over the coasts and the major cities with unprecedented enthusiasm.

It was as if the country was expecting to receive the best part of the world’s population as residents or holidaymakers in the not too distant future, such were the numbers of rooms appearing. The developers joined the super-rich.

For all their spectacular wealth though, there is one asset which businessmen struggle to buy: recognition. They are richer than celebrities, yet no one ever asks for their autograph, pesters them for a photo or gasps at their creations. This can be a problem for a man whose opinion of himself dwarfs his own skyscrapers.

Stamping His Name On History

Ever the entrepreneur, Juan Bautista had a solution. With the muscle of his business, and his family name and fortune behind him, in 2004 he rode the economic updrafts to conquer one of the great peaks of Valencian society – the presidency of the city’s football club.

Like Soler, Valencia Club de Fútbol had also enjoyed a spectacular start to the 21st century, reaching two Champions League finals and winning the Liga and the UEFA Cup under manager Rafael Benitez.

Here then was the chance for Juan to stamp his name on history. Not only would he hitch his name to the team’s formidable domestic and international achievement, he would build them a snazzy new home. Winning trophies is all well and good, but that’s the team’s raison d’etre. Building them a stadium, however, is a once-in–a-century coup; a shiny monument to the vision and genius of the man who built it.

Which is why the greatest day of Juan Bautista Soler’s presidency was November 10, 2006, when he unveiled the model for Valencia’s new €344m, 75,100 seater stadium, one that would stand comparison with Munich’s Allianz Arena or Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium as the very latest in sophistication.

Work began, but history had other ideas.

 

Decline And Fall

The economic boom in Spain was driven almost entirely by construction, so when the financial crisis, powered by the failure of subprime mortgages, hit in 2007, the needle skidded off the record pretty abruptly.

In Valencia, Soler had neglected to sell the land on which the old Mestalla ground stood, and as the recession took a stranglehold, no one wanted to buy it any more. The cash dried up, and work stopped on the new stadium on February 25, 2009, leaving a half-built eyesore in the middle of the city.

By then, Soler was losing control of the club as the Bancaja bank was insisting on an urgent cash injection that would reduce his shareholding. A businessman and subsequent president, Vicente Soriano, popped up with an offer of help that went wrong and led to headlines later, but for now Soler handed over control of the club, and would occasionally surface in the local news trying to hold his business empire together.

He was just another greedy builder whose vanity had got the better of him. With plenty of other scandals and outrages to occupy the press, Soler’s name faded from view.

So it came as some considerable surprise then, on April 9, 2014, to discover that Juan Bautista Soler had a second once-in-a-century project up his manga. He had – according to the charge sheet – conspired to kidnap his successor as president, Vicente Soriano. And was now sitting in a prison cell trying to think of a good way to get out of this particular jam.

For lunatic business solutions, Soler finds himself in a class of his own, but for presidents of Spanish football clubs who thumb their noses at the law on a grand scale, he is not short of company.

These last few years may have been a period of acute financial agony for Spain, but they have also produced a bumper crop of crooked football presidentes, whose law-ignoring instincts have been colourfully over-stimulated by the economic conditions.

Greatest Hits Of Corruption

A recent greatest hits of presidential corruption might read as follows:

At Zaragoza – Principal shareholder Agapito Iglesia, charged with swindling €50 million from a construction project in the city. Murky kickbacks abound, together with the schoolboy error of invoicing for services provided before the companies that supposedly provided those services were even set up to supply them.

At Sevilla – President Jose Maria del Nido, forced to resign last December in order to begin a seven-year jail sentence for swindling public funds. Del Nido, 56, a lawyer and a member as a young man of a violent fascist organisation called Fuerza Nueva, chose to street things up a little for his entrance into the city’s prison by wearing a Sevilla baseball cap. Backwards.

At Betis – Former president Manuel Ruiz de Lopera, 69, stands accused of swindling €24.9m out of the club. Should anyone doubt Mr Ruiz’s high opinion of himself, he once changed the name of the club’s stadium. To his own. Confident of his innocence, Ruiz de Lopera said he expects to return to the post.

At Barcelona – President Sandro Rosell, 50, quits following revelations that the signing of Brazilan star Neymar had cost a lot more than the €57m the club had declared. In a press conference, Rosell says “57 million. End of story.” Big mistake – the phrase is wheeled out every time the media discovers another secret addition to the real cost, including payments to Neymar’s father of €4m for bringing in Brazilian sponsors, and €2m to find “new stars” at his son’s old clubs Santos, “none of which”, according to the newspaper El Mundo, “were contingent of the services actually being delivered.”

(Rosell’s never-ending story has since spread, as on April 20th it was reported that the €2.4m which mysteriously appeared in the bank account of the 10-year-old daughter of former FIFA executive and former president of the Brazilian football federation Ricardo Teixera, is thought to have been made by Rosell.)

But why go to all this trouble really? Don’t these people have enough money already? On the latter question, there’s never enough. On the former, why not? If you can succeed at this eye-watering level of business by landing a high profile presidency, you are in a position to really work the levers of cronyism. Suddenly you’ve got all the right friends in the local, national and international authorities you might ever need.

A few skilfully distributed free invitations to your palco – the director’s imperial style podium above the half way line – will blow the socks off potential clients and business partners, not to mention ease the passage of whatever schemes you’re cooking up.

And should you ever win anything, your back will be slapped and your hand shaken enough to confirm for all time that you really are a great, great guy. Not that you ever doubted it – few posts nourish an obese ego as much as ownership of a football club.

“I am powerful because I am president of Real Madrid,” announced businessman Florentino Perez in a television interview in March. “If I weren’t, then no one would know who I am.” And Mr Perez, currently number 821 on Forbes magazine’s “World’s Billionaires” chart, with a stash of $2.2 billion, is not exactly a nonentity.

El Jefe

This template for the prestige-addicted president for whom laws and regulations are the mere inconvenient tactics of Lilliputian bureaucrats, was set by the late Jesus Gil y Gil (pictured above), the 28th president of Atletico Madrid.

Gil, another of the Spanish building industry’s contributions to society, first came to national attention in 1968 when a block of flats he built collapsed, killing 58 people dining in a restaurant below. He was pardoned by General Franco after 18 months in jail.

In 1987 he became jefe of Atletico Madrid and in 1991 mayor of Marbella, giving him the perfect platform to self-promote, advance his business and help himself to other people’s money.

The self-promotion came naturally, and he delivered his trademark coarse monologues and harangues from, at various times, the comfort of a hot tub while surrounded by girls in bikinis on his own television show; from his white stallion Imperious, and on one occasion from atop an elephant, after winning the Liga with Atletico in 1996, with whom he got through 39 managers in 17 years.

As mayor of Marbella between 1991 and 2002 he enthusiastically promoted the uncontrolled development of the Costa del Sol as a vision of corruption in concrete until the Spanish courts found him unfit to hold public office.

At the time of his death in 2004, 390 million of the city council’s euros were not properly accounted for, he was found to have stolen €30m as part of Marbella’s sponsorship of Atletico and he was in the midst of a case that claimed his shares in Atletico had been acquired fraudulently. (His lawyer as Marbella mayor? One Jose Maria Del Nido.)

Like Enron’s CEO Kenneth Lay, Gil managed to dodge a long prison term by dying first. His own preferred form of justice was the punch in the mouth, delivered personally, regardless of the presence of cameras, to anyone who offended him.

What The Hell I Feel Like

But how can these swindlers and crooks grease their way so easily into positions of such influence and responsibility? And once there, why is it so hard to remove them? How has a system evolved in which the people holding the cheque books of the massive international torrent of money through football in Spain, find it so easy to divert it into their own waiting trucks?

As journalist Giles Tremlett puts it in his book Ghosts of Spain, “Where politicians are builders… corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.”

Even more likely than inevitable feels like a pretty sure thing. But why?

There is a form of Spanish individualism contained in the expression “lo que me da la gana” – “(I’ll do) what the hell I feel like.” If that happens to be driving at 20kph in the fast lane of the motorway, or blocking this exit with my car while I chat to my girlfriend on the phone, then hard luck everyone else.

This attitude can come with a thick coating of machismo too, especially among certain old-school patriarchs, whose value system is so testicle-centric they’d consider it effeminate to use windscreen wipers while driving, let alone indicators or seat belts.

When these characteristics coincide with a gigantic sense of self-importance, it is embarrassing to the powerful man to be held up by the red lights of bureaucracy, so he just barrels right through them.

In order to do this though, he needs help – friends on the council who’ll wave him through, connections in the government who’ll smooth his path, allies in the civil service who’ll look the other way.

In the past, during the dictatorship, this was the official style of business. “Spaniards knew that those in power under Franco were pretty much exempt from the law,” wrote Tremlett. Yet although Spain has been a parliamentary democracy since 1977, not all elected officials or public administrators have quite got the hang of the responsibilities that come with their position, and have enthusiastically taken it as the cue to line their own pockets.

The current prime minister, for example, Mariano Rajoy of the centre right Partido Popular, was last year exposed as accepting an annual kickback of $34,000 between 1997 and 2008 from an illegal slush fund funded by the building industry.

And even the king’s son-in-law, former handball star Inaki Urdangarin, is accused of embezzling millions of euros donated to his charity. His wife, Princess Cristina has also been indicted, and while the errant prince has been banished from royal circles, the stain is spreading toward the king himself. Emails leaked earlier this year show the king took “a close interest” in his son-in-law’s business activities.

The tone, as they say, is set by those at the top. A tone which includes fronting it out at all costs. In Spain, getting caught is nothing. Not until a court makes a sentence stick is the game up. Mr Rajoy, for example, is still the head of the government.

And when it comes to getting sentences to stick, well, that takes us back to our old friend Juan Bautista Soler…

Soler V Soriano

Back in 2009, Vicente Soriano’s offer of help had been to buy Juan Bautista Soler’s shares in Valencia for €85m. Delighted to find an escape hatch, Soler accepted and handed over the stock.

Soriano, however, was unable to move the shares on. The Valencia regional authority prevented him from selling them to a Uruguayan group, Inversiones Dalport as he had planned, because they did not want them in the hands of a suspect organisation (!). Soriano couldn’t pay for the shares, but Soler wouldn’t let him back out of the deal. He wanted his cash.

As Soler’s financial situation turned from grim to desperate with the recession, his businesses collapsed, his yacht was sold for half of its value, and he pursued Soriano through the courts, who eventually ordered Soriano to pay Soler 39m for breach of contract. Soriano though, still wouldn’t cough up, claiming he was broke.

Soler could see this wasn’t the case – after all, Soriano lived right next door to him and he could see him driving off in his fancy car each morning.

So he turned to a local firm of private detectives, Distrito 46, to stick their beaks into Soriano’s business and try and find which offshore hidey-holes he’d stashed his fortune in. Once they’d done that though, how to make Soriano let go of it?

He mentioned his predicament to a man called Ciro D’Anna, an old friend, originally from Naples and the owner of the local Pavarotti restaurant. As the idea of a kidnap took hold, D’Anna, with economic headaches of his own, offered to find some people who might be able to help, for a fee.

Together with another of the alleged conspirators, one Addellatif “Taty” Laaroubi, “head of security” at a local disco, and in charge of access to the palco during Soler’s presidency, they allegedly found the right men for the job: some Colombian mercenaries with the correct professional skills who could find a safe house to store Soriano in, and to choose the best people to convince Soriano to hand over the loot.

Just as the plan was ready to go, however, one of those involved got cold feet, although the police were already onto them anyway. Soriano, who had already spoken to one of the kidnappers without realizing what was going on, escaped a bag over the head by a whisker.

Mr Soler, then, €85m out of pocket, feels himself the victim in this nasty business. After all, it was his shares that were stolen, and he was left high and dry by an impotent court system. What was a man used to getting his own way to do?

He needn’t start selecting his prison toothbrush just yet though. As he knows only too well, justice in Spain is not noted for its speed and efficiency, especially when it encounters a brazen and lawyered up member of the presidential caste, who is prepared to blame everyone else until he runs out of options.

Like another name for the ages in this rogue’s gallery, former Barcelona president Josep Nunez, for instance. Responsible for the appointment of Johan Cruyff as manager, and happy to bathe in the glory of the Dream Team and the first ever European Cup win, Nunez at the same time was also using his position to “look after” local tax inspectors.

(Nunez, who once attempted to build a hideous apartment block on a piece of land reserved for an extension to one of the great golden geese of world tourism, the Sagrada Familia, is a perfect example of the “lo que me da la gana” approach of the presidential type.)

Twenty-one years after first being arrested – 21 years! – the case has still not reached its conclusion. In January, his six-year jail sentence was reduced to two, but he has still not checked in for a stay at His Majesty’s Pleasure.

So the answer then, as to why these people are allowed to get away with their fraud, their embezzlement, and possibly even their kidnappings, is this: because no one can really be bothered to stop them.