Ángel Víctor Torres' shadows: kickbacks, Freemasonry and an awkward silence

Ángel Víctor Torres' kickbacks: the Canary Islands tangle no one has untangled

That a Canary Islands politician has several scandals brewing is nothing new. What is new is that everyone looks the other way when kickbacks during the pandemic come up. Ángel Víctor Torres, former President of the Canary Islands and a minister in Spain's government, has long been at the center of a rumor that in the islands is treated as an open secret: alleged kickbacks, intermediaries with no official position and a scheme pointing to local Freemasonry. None of this has ever reached the courts, but the noise has not stopped.

The commission justified by the emergency

The juiciest story is also the hardest to verify. According to several sources, someone close to the health management circle used to boast about having had a hand in the pandemic commissions. The justification: "since it was an emergency, everything was fine." That same logic, the idea that urgency excuses everything, is what has allowed contracts to be signed without oversight for years in almost every Spanish region. In the Canary Islands, the running joke is that Torres himself, after a minor health scare, stepped back from the front line just as the matter began to smell bad. The coincidence has not gone unnoticed.

The aprons and the Tito Bernie scheme

The second front is more far-fetched. "With Torres we jump to another level, the aprons take the stage," reads the information circulating. The aprons, the nickname for Freemasons, appear in headlines such as "Earthquake in Canary Islands Freemasonry" or "The social-Guasonic corruption of sanchismo" (the political current around Spain's PM Pedro Sánchez). According to those writings, Torres himself would have landed in the Canary Islands to support Freemasonry at the height of the migration crisis, just as the so-called Tito Bernie case came to light. The scheme allegedly led to the expulsion of senior figures, including Grand Master Óscar de Alfonso, for trying to uncover the whole affair. The details of that internal purge have never been fully explained.

The silenced former mayor and the doorman at a brothel

The third thread drops an awkward name: "Oscargután." When that man was mayor, videos circulated of him driving luxury cars belonging to a local mobster. Now, says the critical camp, everyone stays silent. In parallel, mention is made of a man with no institutional position, who had worked as a doorman at a brothel, acting as an intermediary between ministers. That someone without an official office mediates between senior government officials, and that nobody asks about his role, is perhaps the clearest proof that something stinks in Canary Islands politics.

With so many pieces on the table, the question is not whether a kickback system existed in the archipelago. The question is why no one has managed to open an investigation to clarify its scope. Or, worse, whether that investigation is already closed because not conducting it was more profitable.