Opacity remains a defining characteristic of Pedro Sánchez’s government. Citizens’ demands for information on the use of public funds remain largely unanswered. The executive branch refuses to provide information on the costs and destinations of the president of the government’s official trips via the transparency portal—information that should be publicly available and for which officials would not have to devote additional resources.
The executive branch made 63 trips to the Dominican Republic, considered the main destination for the Falcons and the official Airbus outside of Europe. This is the country linked to the Ábalos-Aldama conspiracy involving money laundering related to mask contracts. According to one document, the government did not respond to a citizen’s request for information on Sánchez’s representation expenses as president of the government between 2018 and 2022. Most of the executive’s responses cite the need to prepare a report as a reason for withholding the information. In this particular case, however, not even a response was given.
Face of this lack of transparency, the Transparency Council felt compelled to address a request to the Presidential Ministry. This independent body, responsible for ensuring the transparency of public activities, accuses the executive branch of shirking its responsibilities unless it can clearly and sufficiently justify a ground for inadmissibility or the application of a legal restriction – which has not happened so far.
Lack of Response to Travel Expenses
“This lack of response to this Council’s request for access to information and its request for opinions cannot invalidate the exercise of a constitutional right, such as the right of access to public information,” Transparencia stated. The body, which combats administrative opacity, emphasizes that the requested information has the status of public information and that the ministry in question has not demonstrated any grounds for inadmissibility under Article 18 of the LTAIBG or for the application of the restrictions provided for in Articles 14 and 15 of this regulation. The government has ten days to respond, and the next step could be legal action.
The government has once again provoked the rejection of requests for public information. Updated data from the Transparency Portal shows that up to 214 requests were rejected in the first half of the year – a 25.1% increase compared to the 171 rejections from January to June of last year. This reinforces the growing lack of transparency of the executive branch and coincides with the political turmoil triggered by the Koldo and Begoña cases.
Highest number of rejections of information requests
This is the second-highest number of rejections of requests for public information, surpassed only by the 273 rejections in the first half of 2022. This also surpasses all annual records prior to 2018, before Pedro Sánchez reached the Moncloa, and continues a trend that was interrupted in 2023. The data includes both rejected and incompletely processed requests that did not provide the required information.
Between January and March, up to 96 requests for public information from citizens were rejected – the third-highest number in a decade, very close to the historic first-quarter records set in 2021 and 2022. In this case, the year-on-year growth was “only” 9%, 16 points less than the cumulative growth for the entire semester.
Transparency Law
In 2018 – with only six months in Moncloa – 247 requests were rejected, in 2019 the number was 228, and in 2020 284. In 2021, the number rose to 419, in 2022 to 433, and in 2023 to 352 requests that remained unanswered.
The Transparency Law, which regulates access to public information and good governance, was passed in 2013 to “strengthen the transparency of public activity, regulate and guarantee the right of access to information related to that activity, and establish the obligations of good governance that must be fulfilled by those exercising public responsibility.” The implementation of this law led to the establishment of the Transparency Portal, which receives and forwards information requests to the various institutions.
