Who would want to join a circus like this?

If it is true that difficult times have the ability to bring those that overcome them closer together, psychiatry should examine the exception that is the SGAE.

The entity that groups together authors and editors in Spain, and nominally protects their copyright interests, is less united than ever before with elections to select a new board and president looming on April 26. The deadline for applications was March 22 and the terrain ahead of battle presented a multitude of open fronts.

Four complete candidacies - comprising 31 nominees as board members and eight editors - have been tabled. Two have been going toe-to-toe for months. Their visible faces are José Miguel Fernández Sastrón of De Otra Manera, DOM to its supporters, and Antón Reixa of Autor@s Unidos por la Refundación (AUNIR). There are also two latecomers to the fray: Autores más que Nunca, led by spokesman Jaume Sisa, and Centrados, coordinated by Iván García Pelayo, a former member of disgraced ex-SGAE president Teddy Bautista's board, as is the case with Sastrón and Sisa.

Then there are those who have presented themselves independently, such as Miguel Ríos and Caco Senante. Their sole ambition is to find their way onto the board and thus have a hand in the decisions that are taken thereon. Finally, there is the "flamenco candidacy," which is called Autores por el Cambio (AUPEC) and counts among its six candidates greats of the genre such as Tomatito, Manuel Carrasco and Josemi Carmona.

In total, there are some 140 aspirants for 31 seats on the board (39 when the editors are taken into account). Of them all, only four, the complete lists, will vie to control the SGAE, whose election system is a hubbub of open lists, weighted votes and separate electoral colleges (with musicians on one side and the audiovisual world on the other). In many ways, it is similar to Congress: the president of SGAE, like the prime minister, is chosen by the votes of members of the board. Theoretically, although it is always impossible to tell with the SGAE, each voter is expected to opt for the candidate at the head of each list.

The SGAE's nefarious practices came to light when the Civil Guard raided its offices on July 1 last year. It was subsequently discovered that Bautista and four SGAE executives had been diverting funds from the copyright collection agency to private firms that they owned. The main suspect in the authorities' Operation Saga was José Luis Rodríguez Neri, an investor involved with the multinational chain of Arteria theaters, which lost the SGAE 251 million euros.

The SGAE's offices were raided by the Civil Guard on June 1, 2011

The interest on the financial misadventure alone is worth 18 million euros a year, part of which is covered by the money SGAE collects.

A total rejection of the times, excesses and methods of the Bautista era - the former singer spent 30 years at the head of SGAE - is one of the few points agreed upon among the electoral hopefuls, who speak grandly of "starting again," "transparency" and "reform."

Awaiting the successful platform will be not just the small matter of plugging the financial black hole in the entity's accounts, but also restoring the image of an institution with less than flattering press surrounding it.

These matters have, until now, been embarked upon by an interim board that took over after the judicial intervention and will step aside again after the elections, which have been delayed by political clumsiness on the part of both the previous Socialist government and the present Popular Party administration.

The interest alone on the misadventure is worth 18 million euros a year

The hopes of a significant part of the artists for the presentation of a candidacy of consensus fell rapidly by the wayside due to the polarization caused by debate between Sastrón, a former member of the board who ran against Bautista in the last election, and Reixa, who has cast himself as a progressive.

With these late movements, the more than 21,000 authors with the right to vote (the number was raised by 12,000 by including heirs to copyrighted material and those artists that had generated rights worth more than 640 euros in the past four years) have a dizzying panoply of options: from the candidature of Jaume Sisa, who has the backing of Imanol Uribe, Manuel Gómez Pereira and Ana Diosdado (the list does not designate a president until it has received enough support to name one), to the more than probable individual bid of Caco Senante, who was Bautista's strongman for many years but has stressed that he does not represent continuity of any kind.

But the most pertinent question at this stage has to be: why on earth would anybody want to get involved in madness such as the SGAE?