The Prosecutor's Office of the Supreme Court has archived this Monday the complaint against the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for the financing of her institutional trip to Mexico last May. The Public Prosecutor's Office does not find objective evidence of bribery in the reported facts. The decree leaves unresolved the origin of the controversy over the accounts of the trip, for which only two payments for using the authorities' lounge at Barajas airport were recorded.
"The reported facts do not present, in the state in which they have been reported, characteristics of a crime," states the resolution. The prosecutor maintains that the lack of public information and the differences between the declared expenses do not, by themselves, prove a third-party payment with criminal relevance. Nor does she find elements that allow identifying a gift, who would have offered it, or its conscious acceptance by Ayuso in consideration of her position.
The complaint was filed on August 21 by Francisco Javier Flores Vaquerizo and referred to article 422 of the Penal Code, which punishes the acceptance of gifts offered to an authority by reason of their functions. The brief suggested that someone outside the Administration had assumed part of the trip and mentioned as a hypothesis entities related to the Platino Awards. The Prosecutor's Office considers that this possibility lacks sufficient objective evidence.
The complainant requested 23 groups of actions, including invoices, air and hotel reservations, communications, economic information, and witness statements. The prosecutor refuses to undertake a general investigation to discover if a crime existed based on the information gaps. She also considers some of the proceedings disproportionate, which affected banking and tax data of third parties and relationships from other fiscal years.
Two payments in Barajas and the rest not detailed
The documentation that originated the complaint recorded 623.28 euros in Ayuso's name. Of these, 220.89 corresponded to the use of the authorities' lounge in Terminal 4 on May 2 and another 402.39 for the same service on May 11. These annotations excluded air tickets, accommodation, meals, and travel during the stay in Mexico.
The contrast appeared with the statements of three members of the delegation. The Minister of Culture, Mariano de Paco; the general director of Tourism and Hospitality, Laura Martínez Cerro; and the director of Management of the Teatros del Canal, Ruperto Merino Solís, jointly declared 14,847.78 euros in expenses. Their different functions and itineraries prevent using that sum to calculate the cost of the president's trip, although their sheets did include usual items for transport, hotels, and subsistence.
Ayuso responded in August with a restrictive interpretation of the information she could provide. "One can only publish the expenses that are attributable to the Administration," she stated in Villa del Prado. She added that disbursements unrelated to regional accounts could not be published because they were not their own. That response left pending the identification of who had assumed the concepts that were not included in her declaration.
The regional government had presented the trip as an institutional visit to strengthen economic and cultural ties with Mexico. The announced agenda included business meetings, activities in Aguascalientes, and attendance at the Platino Awards in the Riviera Maya. The archiving decree examines the existence of criminal indications in the complaint, without reconstructing the financing of each part of the trip.
The boycott that Ayuso attributed to Sheinbaum
The tour was also marked by the confrontation with the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and by protests against Ayuso's defense of Hernán Cortés. On May 8, the Madrid Executive announced the cancellation of the final part of the agenda, including the trip to Monterrey and attendance at the Platino Awards gala, alleging a "boycott climate" from the Mexican Government.
The explanations about the financing were also not uniform. The regional spokesperson, Miguel Ángel García Martín, maintained upon return that international trips were paid with the corresponding budgets. Days earlier, his Government had indicated that the invitation from the award organizers included the delegation's stay in the Riviera Maya.
Ayuso herself later refused to identify some of her interlocutors during the visit. On June 9, she justified that she would not reveal "which media or which businessmen I saw so that they continue to be persecuted," in reference to the Sheinbaum Government. The president began her return on Sunday, May 10, and landed in Madrid on Monday, May 11.
