The company that is the third most effective of the husband of the vice president Nadia Calviño is charging to influence the autonomous communities so that they put on the market projects linked to European funds that benefit our clients. It is precisely the Ministry of Economy that Calviño directs that is in charge of the distribution of European funds for recovery destined for autonomy. The company is Bee Digital, a commercial number with which the company Yellow Pages Digital Solutions operates. Ignacio Manrique de Lara, the husband of the Vice President of the Government, was part of the company's leadership as Director of Marketing.
Bee Digital is doing business with European funds for economic recovery
as an intermediary and manager of investments financed with the budgets of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism (MRR). Specifically, the company offers projects to regional governments with the argument of the fight against the depopulation of rural areas. Bee Digital offers regional governments to act jointly to obtain funds with the argument of developing "territorial projects for entrepreneurship and micro-enterprises". It is one of the sections of the so-called "Measure 23" of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism, that of "new public policies for a dynamic, resilient and inclusive labor market", which also includes "territorial projects for rebalancing and equity ».
The company that pays Calviño's husband is offered to the autonomies as an outstanding manager of European funds in this matter. She does so by designing actions aimed at supporting "self-employment, entrepreneurship" and "employment stability" in rural areas that need to settle population. She thus indicates it in an email sent by one of the regional governments to which they are offering. "We are already working with 2 Communities, together with our partner Vodafone in carrying out these projects," he indicates in this email that ABC has had access and at the moment to the authorities of that autonomous community to maintain a half-hour telematics meeting expand the information. It is understood that the object of Bee Digital is intended for European funds for our clients.
The number of possible projects that can be financed under "Measure 23" of the MRR is extensive: from initiatives in rural tourism and historical-artistic heritage, to self-employment programs, cooperatives and social entrepreneurship, passing through the promotion of agriculture or socioeconomic development linked to culture and artistic production.
ABC is in contact with Bee Digital, who only agreed to respond by writing to previously submitted questions. Finally, the company delivered a statement plagued with generalities and without responding to most of the questions raised. He did acknowledge contacts with the Autonomous Communities, but denied having contracts: "Currently, BeeDIGITAL will be in talks with all the Autonomous Communities, since due to their activity and the type of services they offer related to the digitization of SMEs, they can inform them to stimulate digitization in rural areas. Thus, the CCAA will value launching the calls addressed to SMEs. At present, BeeDIGITAL has not signed any contract with the CCAA”.
As a result of the lively President of the Government and Minister of Economy, Bee Digital maintains that "he is a professional with a career of more than 30 years in the sector of digitalization of SMEs" and that "he has held different positions in national and international companies" .
Ignacio Manrique de Lara has been an executive at Bee Digital for three and a half years, according to his profile on the social network Linkedin. On the official page that this company has on the internet, Ignacio Manrique de Lara appeared in the third part of the corporate letter, with the position of marketing director of the company, and that he promoted himself after joining the company's plant .
According to that Linkedin profile, Manrique de Lara signed for his current company in September 2018. With a degree in Economics and Business from the Complutense University of Madrid and a postgraduate degree from the IESE business school, he joined Bee Digital as director of Alliances, New Business and M&A, but in just eight months he climbed to the Marketing Department, one of the six positions that make up the company's leadership and third on the ranks, after the CEO and the Commercial and Expansion Director.
the signing
He landed in this company practically at the same time as his wife did in the Government, after years assigned to positions of responsibility in the European Union. When Pedro Sánchez incorporated him, after the censorship against Mariano Rajoy on June 1, 2018, Calviño had been Director General of the Budget at the European Commission for four years. Her husband's career path has geographically paralleled hers. Ignacio Manrique de Lara worked in Brussels in 2018, but moved from manager to Spain when Calviño entered the Government. He had previously been part of the staff of Grupo Santillana and Panda Security, among others.
Three months after his wife settled in Madrid as Sánchez's Minister of Economy, Manrique got his new job at the company that is now offering autonomy to advise on European recovery funds, which go through the negotiated who are under the command of his wife. The advice on European funds offered by Bee Digital, totally legitimate as a business activity, nevertheless intersects the interests of Calviño as a public official, and her husband, as a director of that company.
Since 2015, the regulator of the exercise of senior positions in the General Administration of the State has established, in an improved manner, the limits and consequences of conflicts of interest. Among other assumptions, contemplate precisely those that may occur between the decisions of the high position and the interested parties of their spouse or sentimental partner.
In 2019, Pedro Sánchez's PSOE considered that this legal framework had to withstand even more the conflicts of interest of politicians. It came as a commitment in the section on "better democratic quality, anti-corruption and transparency." Among other actions, committing to promulgate the enactment of new rules to regulate "in a more effective way the declarations of the interested parties of high positions to combat the conflicts of the interested parties, precisely fixing the conditions of incompatibility of the interested parties and bearing the penalties for non-compliance”.
