The main corrupting power

The main corrupting power in Spain is what, generically, has become known as ‘the brick’ . The phenomenon is by no means restricted to the coast. As Spain’s economy booms, towns and cities have been turned into vast building sites. The building of new homes. Office blocks, EU-funded motorways or other public works is being done on a scale unthinkable in cluttered northern Europe. Everywhere you look in Spain, the city skylines are crammed with cranes. Vast new boroughs appear almost overnight in Madrid, complete with their shopping malls, sports centers and underground stations. Tiny satellite villages become, in the space of just a few years, busy new towns. Massive bulldozers push new motorways through olive groves as bewildered elderly villagers look on, and their grandchildren calculate whether they can go now for nights out in the nearest city.
Catalonia, Madrid, Seville and the Sun Coast account for much, if not most, of Spain’s new building work. Where politicians are builders, as they often are in the Sun Coast, corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.
Thing could be a lot worse, however. Compared with the deep institutionalized corruptin in , say Italy, Spain is a clean country. For while corruption – or the popular belief in it – floats freely around regional and local government, it has not settled in the core of the Spanish state.
From the book ‘Ghosts of Spain’ By Giles Tremet