After Villar rule comes the Villar legacy
'Villarato is over,' a friend told me as soon as he learned of Ángel María Villar's arrest. Indeed, Villarato, understood as the long term of Villar's mandate, with his knack of staying in power, can be taken for granted. But after Villarato comes 'villarismo', a term not coined by me, but byJavier Tebas, and is used to define the continued faith of Villar's supporters, that offspring - a few of them not so honourable - lavished with various privileges, across so many years. They are still there, aspiring for a 'Villarismo' without Villar, just like 'The Bunker' as we called it during the transition to democracy in Spain, of those that aspired to extend Francoism once Franco was gone.
Villar's non-existent new board
Spain's secretary of state for sport, Jose Ramon Lete has made it his mission to avoid this from happening. His will be a combination of courage and cunning. Tebas, on the other hand, will be more expeditious, likely in favour of requesting judicial intervention, as with the case between Atlético and Jesús Gil; the judge himself would appoint an investigator to start from scratch. But the remaining Villarista aspires to something else. Today they want to assemble a board that does not exist, although they say it does. According to them, Villar had already named the board, but only verbally. At the head of this movement is Marcelino Maté, president of Castilla y León, of whom I have spoken about before, and Esther Gascón, whose name has been involved in the conversations as a beneficiary of 300,000 euros.
Corruption holding us back
There is hardly anything in there to take advantage of, not much worth saving, and Lete knows it. Those 44 pages from Judge Pedraje's statement give a portrait of a tarnished organisation, a house of entanglements. If the CSD accomodates these people it will be making a mistake that will come back to haunt them. Mendez de Vigo, Minister of Education, Culture and Sport, has already been portrayed sufficiently to replace Cardenal in the search for 'an honorable exit for Villar', confirming that corruption is the subject that always holds this government back. Let's see if this time...