Simon Hunter
PUBLIC prosecutors in Madrid have opened a court probe into the activities of the partner of regional premier Isabel Diaz Ayuso. Alberto Gonzalez Amador is being investigated on allegations of tax fraud and document fraud.
According to the lawsuit, to which Spanish daily El Diario has had exclusive access, Gonzalez is suspected by prosecutors of having evaded €350,951 in taxes during 2020 and 2021, by creating a web of dummy corporations and fake invoices.
He is accused of using these methods to reduce the real profits of his companies, which were made during the worst years of the Covid-19 pandemic, and thus pay less tax.
According to El Diario, Gonzalez filed 15 fake invoices for invented costs, for a total of €1.7 million. He wrote this amount off against his taxes as expenses, thus saving himself the aforementioned sum of €350,951.
Both of the companies that are being investigated, Maxwell Cremona Ingeniería y Procesos para el Fomento del Medioambiente, and Masterman & Whitaker Medical Supplies and Health Process Engineering, are 100% owned by Gonzalez.
The first is a company offering healthcare services, while the second, a firm that has no employees, is dedicated to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.
The investigation began after he filed his tax returns in 2021 and 2022, which corresponded to the previous years. The Spanish Tax Agency could see from the figures that while his companies’ sales had increased sixfold during 2020, to €2.3 million, they had only registered €8,400 in profits due to the suspect costs.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by his partner, Isabel Diaz Ayuso, who is 45 years old and has been the regional premier of Madrid since 2019.
The revelations are, however, a major embarrassment both to her and her conservative Partido Popular (PP), which in recent weeks has been attacking the governing Socialist Party for its alleged links to another scandal involving commissions that were supposedly paid to the right-hand man of the former transport minister, Jose Luis Abalos, for facilitating government contracts for face masks.
The national leader of the PP, Alberto Nuñez Feijoo, said on Tuesday that Ayuso ‘does not have any inspections’ open by the Tax Agency.
Speaking during a radio interview on Onda Cero, he said that it was her partner, Alberto Gonzalez, who will have to ‘answer to the Tax Agency as any citizen would when they are investigated’.
Meanwhile, the central government’s delegate in Madrid, Franisco Martín, on Tuesday called on Ayuso to offer an explanation.
“Paying your taxes is also complying with the Constitution,” he wrote via his account on social network X (formerly Twitter). “Explanations are urgently needed from premier Isabel Diaz Ayuso. Did she know about this?”
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