Seville, December 14, 2020. In relation to the controversy raised by the request of the VOX Municipal Group in the Seville City Council, for detailed information on the budget and activities planned for 2021 by the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation against Terrorism and Violence, we are obliged to remember, again, the reasons that have led to such a request, for the sake of transparency that is supposed to every Foundation that receives grants of public money.
In the first place, we must remember that, as patrons that we are of the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation, it is our obligation to ensure the interests of the aforementioned entity and for the fulfillment of its statutes and objectives for which it was created. Although this consideration may seem obvious, various publications and opinion articles recently published by the local written press could mislead, in a clear example of information manipulation to prevent public opinion from having access to the information and to VOX's position in relation to to this matter.
We do not have and will not have any political interest in this matter beyond the clarification of some accounts and activities that, in our opinion, and from the information provided to us, we understand as opaque.
At the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation on the 9th, in which we were presented with the budget and the calendar of activities for 2021, our spokesperson for the VOX Municipal Group, Cristina Peláez, in her capacity as patron, appropriately claimed and in a conciliatory tone, detailed and disaggregated information on the budget chapter after verifying that all the activities planned for next year are a copy of the same activities carried out in previous years and that each activity carries the same amount of expenditure. This request, out loud, received an irate response from the Councilor for the Popular Party Ignacio Flores, who, far from responding to this basic request for information, devoted his time and effort to lash out at VOX, an intervention that was seconded by the rest of employers and representatives of political groups. In spite of everything, and to prevent this VOX position from being manipulated, as has happened, we decided to abstain and not vote against.
As a consequence of this situation, VOX requested information in writing from the president of the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation, on November 9 of this year. On December 4, VOX received a letter signed by the president of the Foundation, Teresa Jiménez-Becerril, in which there is not a sufficient response, in our opinion, to the request for detailed information on the budget and actions to be developed for 2021. Furthermore, we understand that the response offered deepens our concern about the use of public money in the hands of this Foundation, which will also receive an extra contribution of 230,000 euros from the money resulting from the liquidation of the DeSevilla Foundation, by decision of the mayor of the city, Juan Espadas, so that, finally, the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation will receive double the public money of the initially foreseen in its budget. Money that, we remember again, belongs to all Sevillians.
Accusing VOX of harassing the victims of terrorism, as the newspaper ABC de Sevilla does this December 14, in an opinion column signed by Alberto García Reyes, and seconded on social networks by its director Alvaro Ybarra, is of a pettiness that exceeds all limits of what is tolerable. For the knowledge of Messrs. García and Ybarra, VOX is the party of José Antonio Ortega Lara, kidnapped by ETA for 532 days in a Mondragón den and of Rafael García Ortiz, provincial deputy in Seville and brother of Ascensión García Ortiz, murdered along with her husband Alberto in Don Remondo street in Seville by some gunmen that the Government of Pedro Sánchez and Pablo Iglesias have recently awarded by bringing them closer to prisons in the Basque Country. It is also the party of Francisco José Alcaraz, whose brother and his two little nieces were murdered in the barracks of the Civil Guard in Zaragoza. Vexation, gentlemen, is to coincide the release from prison of the author of the brutal attack with the anniversary of such a vile and bloody terrorist action. Vexation, gentlemen of ABC, is to allow with the votes that those who have agreed with the heirs of ETA continue to govern, today in the direction of the Government.
The opinion column of Mr. García Reyes published this Monday, is of a lack of journalistic rigor without limits, written from the deep evil of a person who deserted his office to give himself up to dark interests, or not so much, as it is to serve as a leash of transmission of the PP to guarantee the institutional publicity that keeps ABC de Sevilla a thread of life. This newspaper should become aware of its loss of credibility and influence in Sevillian society, as was proven not so long ago when it tried to influence the internal processes of the PP in Seville and lost resoundingly.
This opinion column by García Reyes, entitled "VOX resigns from dignity" becomes like a boomerang against its editor and his head, to which the same title that heads the article can be applied without fear of being wrong. ABC has resigned, yes, out of dignity, but also out of respect for its readers, respect for the victims of Terrorism, Alberto and Ascen, whom they deliberately forget, hide and ignore. Ignorance is very daring, so much so that Mr. García Reyes repeats up to three times that VOX has three councilors in Seville, when there are two. That an entire deputy director of a serious newspaper has not found out in two years that VOX has two councilors in Seville, clearly reflects that ABC does not have, nor has it had, the slightest intention of knowing the reality of this political formation in Seville, the second most voted after the PSOE. And this is probably what hurts the most, to outnumber the political formation that has given them and continues to feed them.
At this stage of the information manipulation that we suffer in Spain at all levels, of which by the way so much is protested from the pages of ABC, we recommend that Messrs. Ybarra and García Reyes do their journalistic work, get to the bottom of the matter and they wonder if the reluctance about the Jiménez-Becerril Foundation's budgets and activities make sense. In our opinion, they know it, hence they have not published, neither in the article nor in their information, not a single line about it.
Finally, we want to emphasize that we will not lower our guard and that we will never be part of the progressive consensus, that we owe ourselves to our voters and supporters, to our principles and values and that sooner or later we will dismantle all the beach bars that squander public money, regardless of their surnames, organizations or institutions that protect them.
