“Not 10, not 15: only five deputies went to dinner and they did so at separate tables and respecting the curfew (…). There is nothing more, nothing, zero.” This is how the PSOE settled the internal investigation into the members of its parliamentary group who had gone to the restaurant Ramses of Madrid at the request of his benchmate Juan Bernardo Fuentes Curbelo -nicknamed as Tito Berni-, forced to resign last February for his alleged involvement in the Mediator caseand other people whom he presented as businessmen.
Of those five politicians who ended up acknowledging that they had attended the aforementioned establishment in the fall of 2020, when the restrictions due to the Covid pandemic were still in force, but denying any link with the corruption plot, only one has repeated on the lists of the general elections of 23-J and has managed to keep his seat in the hemicycle of the Carrera de San Jerónimo. The other four were left directly out of the candidacies of which they had been part four years ago.
Manuel Arribasthe only diner at that Ramses dinner who is still a deputy, is so despite the fact that the PSOE Provincial Committee in Avila decided to separate it and that the Autonomous Executive of Castilla y León ratified this decision. It was the national Ferraz leadership that, through the body that supervises the “proposals” of the territories and introduces the changes it considers appropriate, forced the reincorporation of its name accompanied by the promotion of the second to the first position that in November 2019 Margarita Robles had occupied.
“It can hurt us,” the general secretary of the Castilian-Leonese socialists, Luis Tudanca, then lamented about the impact at the polls that the vote could have on his party. Mediator case, although he added that it was “somewhat exaggerated and false.” His voice had also been the only internal critic that was raised in the Federal Committee that definitively and unanimously approved the 23-J candidacies to say that he felt “outraged”, “defrauded” and “enormously disappointed” by the imposition of both the head of the list to Congress for Ávila and that of the Senate for Valladolid, Javier Izquierdo.
Of the other four deputies who attended the dinner with Tito Berni in Ramses, one of them, Uxia Tizónif he had repeated on the socialist ballot of Orense by decision of the Provincial Committee, although without achieving a seat, since it was number three and the party only achieved one seat in the Lower House for this constituency. In this case it was the regional leadership that chose to leave out its until now national representative and the Federal Executive limited themselves to endorsing his departure.