Silence suits Rajoy on Camps corruption charge

While calls grow for Francisco Camps to step down, Popular Party (PP) leader Mariano Rajoy on Sunday avoided making any reference to the criminal indictment handed down last week against the Valencia regional premier - charges that threaten to rock Spain's major opposition force.

In his first public appearance since a Valencia High Court judge indicted premier Francisco Camps for allegedly accepting dress suits as gifts, Rajoy ducked reporters' questions as he arrived in Santiago de Compostela for a meeting of Galician party leaders.

Pressure for Rajoy to discuss what action, if any, he plans to take on Camps' future, heightened on Sunday with calls from the Socialist Party and the Valencian regional opposition Compromís nationalist group demanding that Camps step down.

Government spokesman and Public Works Minister José Blanco said it was "necessary" for Rajoy to "give explanations and take action" in the Camps case. "Mariano Rajoy cannot look the other way now that Camps will have to take the witness stand," Blanco said in an interview with SER radio.

Camps was indicted Friday on charges of accepting 14,000 euros' worth of clothing items, including dress suits, from businessmen tied to the Gürtel contracts-for-kickbacks network. Judge José Flors ruled there was enough evidence to put Camps and three other Valencia PP leaders on trial after examining tax office reports and taking testimony from several witnesses, including a tailor who said the premier had never paid for the suits.

Along with the witness evidence, Flors said that there exists handwritten documents by the Gürtel businessmen that make reference to the gifts that Camps may have received.

Mònica Oltra, deputy spokeswoman for Compromís in the regional parliament, on Sunday called on Camps "to stop burying his head" because it is ""inconceivable" that after the investigation began nearly two years ago he has "not given any type of public explanation."

"As each hour passes without him saying whether he will step down, the office he presides becomes more tarnished and our democratic system becomes more eroded," Oltra said.

In August 2009, the Valencia High Court, in a split decision, decided to drop the investigation for lack of evidence, but the Supreme Court ordered it reopened after prosecutors appealed the ruling on the urging of the local Socialist grouping.

The PP has charged the Socialist government of using the courts to harass Camps and other party leaders in Valencia.

Camps, who won re-election by a hefty margin in May, has always denied that he received the suits, saying that he paid for them out of his own pocket. But last week, he made a turn-around by admitting that he did accept the gifts but as regional leader of the PP and not as a public office holder.

Nonetheless, Judge Flors ruled that the two positions are indivisible, and Camps cannot distinguish the two posts he holds at the same time.

"Never mind the price [of the suits]; a regional premier cannot be bought at any price," Oltra said.

Carmen Ninet, deputy Socialist spokeswoman in the Valencia parliament, called on Rajoy "to end Camps' suffering" by removing him from public office.

"If it is true, as [Valencia mayor] Rita Barberá says, that he is very affected, then he should go immediately for his good and the good of all Valencians," Ninet said.

The Valencian Socialist also questioned where Camps was to get the 55,000 euros Judge Flors ordered him to post as bail as he awaits trial. Valencia's United Left (IU) spokesman Ignacio Blanco regretted that PP regional leaders have not yet "learned to conjugate the verb 'to resign' in the first person, or in the singular or in the plural."

Blanco, meanwhile, said the PP should "apply to themselves" the same formulas they demand of others, in reference to recent calls by some opposition leaders for Socialist candidate Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba to renounce his nomination after three top law enforcement officials were indicted in an ETA tip-off case.

The PP prefers to "immobilize" the Valencian Government instead of suffering "a political cost, with an indicted premier who is hiding from the public and a spokesperson who does not give one convincing bit of explanation."