Spanish PM calls Senate graft committee 'a circus'
MADRID
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez Thursday told a tetchy Senate committee hearing into a corruption scandal that has rocked his minority leftist government that the probe was "a circus."
Corruption investigations targeting former Socialist heavyweights and Sanchez's wife have embarrassed Sanchez, who took office in 2018 pledging to clean up Spanish politics after the conservative opposition was convicted in its own graft scandal.
The hearing before a Senate committee will grill Sanchez over a complicated affair involving alleged kickbacks in exchange for public contracts for sanitary equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The scandal has ensnared ex-Transport Minister Jose Luis Abalos and former senior Socialist official Santos Cerdan, both former close allies of Sanchez who helped him rise to power.
Abalos's former adviser Koldo Garcia is another key suspect in the case that has seen Cerdan jailed and police enter Socialist headquarters in Madrid, in damaging images for Sanchez.
The opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), which commands a majority in the Senate, seeks to prove that Sanchez knew about or participated in the murky maneuvers.
But responding to the committee's conservative president, who had just rebuked him in a bad-tempered opening to the hearing, Sanchez fired back that "I think this is a circus."
Sanchez told the committee that Socialist party funding was "absolutely clean" and that receiving cash payments, linked by the police investigation to the alleged corruption, was "perfectly legal" for official expenses if they came with receipts.
