The two companies in which Francis Puig, the brother of the Valencian president Ximo Puig, appears as administrator, have continued to add public aid in the last three years.
Between the two they add up to an injection of 478,333 euros through public funds since 2019, according to the records consulted by the Economist.
Money that comes from the Generalitat Valenciana, but also from the Generalitat de Catalunya. Specifically, Comunicacions dels Ports, the audiovisual company located in Morella that broadcasts radio and television in that northern region of Castellón, was the beneficiary of subsidies for 409,639 euros. Its subsidiary Mas Mut Produccions, domiciled in the nearby town of Peñarroya de Tastavins in Teruel, obtained another 68,694 euros.
Valencian and Catalan
Most of the public funds collected by both companies came from the same lines of subsidies that are under judicial scrutiny. On the one hand, the aid granted to promote the use of Valencian in the media stands out. Since 2019, the Department of Education has awarded Comunicacions dels Ports three grants and another to its subsidiary Mas Mut, despite being located in an Aragonese town, according to the transparency platform of the Valencian Administration.
In addition, the former also received four subsidies from Servef-Labora, the regional employment department, for the hiring of young people and the conversion of temporary contracts into permanent ones. Between both companies they add up to 202,370 euros from the Valencian autonomous coffers in those 3 years.
The audiovisual companies even managed to reap more money from the Catalan Administration during this period, despite the fact that none of them is domiciled in its territory. The Castellón media group obtained almost 276,000 euros from Catalan budgets, also from lines linked to the language. The Department of the Presidency of the Generalitat, in the hands of ERC, awarded 11 subsidies between 2019 and 2021 to the two firms linked to the brother of the Valencian president for their broadcasts and publications in Catalan.
The public funds that the firms of the brother of the Valencian socialist leader have obtained are especially significant when compared to the volume of business they generate. In the case of the parent company, Comunicacions del Ports obtained 111,152 euros of regional subsidies in 2019. In that same year, its turnover stood at 323,720 euros, according to the accounts presented in the commercial registry
judicial appointment
These subsidies in the last three years are added to those included in the case opened by the Investigating Court number 4 of Valencia for an alleged crime of subsidy fraud and documentary falsification in those public aid received between 2015 and 2018. A report of the Civil Guard that the court requested quantifies the subsidies received in that period at 1.2 million euros, including those from these two companies as well as from other Enrique Adell Bover companies, which shared several businesses with the . The network of companies, in addition to the Valencian Community and Catalonia, also received subsidies in Aragon.
Precisely the brother of Ximo Puig is summoned today to testify as a defendant in the court that is investigating whether crimes have been committed in the process. Among the possible irregularities mentioned in the Civil Guard report is the possible existence of crossed invoices that could have been used to obtain larger subsidies, in addition to questioning some of the invoices or pointing out that they can hardly be considered eligible expenses or They are not sufficiently justified.
Although the police document is not conclusive considering that these irregularities may be due to errors, it has revealed that to obtain the aid the companies included supporting documents and invoices that affect other members of the Puig family. Thus, one of the contracts that was subsidized in 2018 was that of the Valencian president’s own son, who had registered unemployed 4 days earlier and whose contract was processed two days before the end of the aid period. To justify the expenses, they also resorted to purchases of agricultural diesel that had little to do with their activity, the rental of real estate from another of the brothers of the Valencian president and business invoices from Francis Puig’s couple.
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