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OPINION Tighten up
SECURITY lapses are often discovered when it’s too late. Belgium certainly learnt this the hard way this month - as did the world as we watched agog - and the shocking events brought into sharp relief airport security everywhere. We have been lucky enough to spot some lapses in Malaga airport’s security before any serious or tragic events took place. It is not the first time, with one of our journalists getting on a flight recently without showing his passport once. So let’s funnel the resources into the places where they are desperately needed: more security staff in Spain’s biggest airports, and tougher, more stringent security bag checks. Who would argue for scrimping and saving in the fight against terror?
Johan’s legacy
‘Winning is an important thing,’ said Johan Cruyff. ‘But to have your own style. That is the greatest thing.’ Cruyff had both. And in the pantheon of football giants, the Dutch master was utterly unique. Cruyff not only conquered all as a player, he went on to become a managerial great. It wasn’t just the four La Liga titles in a row and the 1992 European Cup he brought to the Nou Camp. It is difficult to overstate Cruyff’s influence and importance to the modern Barcelona team. In setting up La Masia, the Dutchman embedded his swashbuckling style deep in Barcelona’s DNA. His legacy lives in the Camp Nou team to this day. Renaming the stadium in his honour would be a fitting tribute.
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I
T’S a murky form of modernday piracy that has netted millions for its practitioners. But it’s not treasure that has enticed these 21st century Spanish brigands. It’s fish. The hunt for the precious omega 3-rich Patagonian toothfish - known as ‘white gold’ - can yield an incredible €73 million in a single season’s haul. Described by celebrated food critic AA Gill as the ‘most utterly delicious fish’, it is understandably big business, but also highly illegal, akin to hunting the critically endangered rhino or gorilla. So critical has become its protection that only tiny shoals are left and figures such as Prince Charles have helped to launch campaigns to protect them. And despite thousands of restaurants around the world refusing to serve it up, industrial scale fishing somehow still continues… and its worse culprits are a Galician gang, that thankfully has been finally snared after a decade of evading justice. The detention of six members of the Vidal family after an investigation by Interpol and Spanish police was greeted with delight by environmentalists around the world this month.
END OF A brave pursuit by ecologists could finally spell the end of one of Spain’s top fishing gangs, writes Joe Duggan Nuclear SAFER:
T
IME is running out and none of the major political parties have any type of direction as to where they are going. April 29 seems to be the deadline day for the parties to try to pull together a coalition government that can run Spain for the next four years. But after more than 90 days since the December 20 elections left a fractured parliament and an ungovernable state, the four major political forces have refused to budge on their positions. The Socialists will once again try to convince leftist Podemos to join its pact
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which be paid and the USA by both Spain .
Doggedly
Fishing baron Antonio Vidal ‘Tono’ Pego and his father Antonio Vidal ‘Tucho el Coyo’ Suárez have been doggedly pursued across the seven seas by Sea Shepherd, a brave, little known marine wildlife conservation group. Indeed, it was largely thanks to the bravery of one of its sailors, Captain Siddharth Chakravarty that these two pirates were finally brought to justice. A 110-day chase of the Vidal supership Thunder by Chakravarty, last year, became the longest in maritime history. “For years, the Vidal crime syndicate have destroyed the vulnerable toothfish populations in the shadowlands of Antarctica, using the blurriness in international law to hide their involvement,” Chakravarty told the Olive Press from the South China Sea, this week. “This is now thankfully coming to an end.” The Spanish high court has said the family form a ‘criminal organisation’ and they have hit the Vidals with €17.84m in fines. This sad tragic story has its roots in the insatiable Spanish desire for fish. In 2013, Spaniards devoured more than 26kg of fish, behind only Portugal in Europe and close to Japanese levels of consumption.
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LUCRATIVE: Chilean sea bass and (inset left) Captain Chakravarty And their enormous appetite Galicians were forced to emifor fish shows no signs of stop- grate) turned the coastal area ping, with this month plans be- into one of the main portals for ing unveiled for a controversial Europe’s drug trade. 65-hectare site near Zamora Antonio Vidal Suárez was born which would house the ‘biggest in 1952 with the region’s cold farmed salmon factory in the Atlantic brine flowing through world’. his veins. Raised in Riviera, Meanwhile, Galicia accounts Spain’s most important inland for 50% of Spain’s fishing in- fishing port, he learned his dustry, with overnight lorries trade from his father, a local transporting shipowner. fish hundreds of When his miles from Vigo father died, Vidal Suarez was to Mercamadrid, Antonio set the world’s sec- born with Galicia’s up his own ond largest fish comcold Atlantic brine trawler market. pany. His son As Spanish Antonio, Tono, flowing in his stocks have dea highly-intellipleted, its fisherveins gent man with men have been a business deforced further gree and fluout to sea. ent in English, But Galicia’s misty docks also became his trusted right-hand have a long association with man in their company Ribeiro nautical skulduggery. During Vidal Armadores. the 1980s the local criminal The company operated local fraternity, capitalising on the trawlers and although things area’s links to South America went swimmingly to start with (forged when poverty-struck things got tougher for Galicia’s
Stalemate
Political uncertainty continues in Madrid with major parties at loggerheads with the centre right Ciudadanos party. But Podemos wants too much power in any future government, which the Socialists are not willing to yield. At the same time, Podemos don't want Ciudadanos to be included in the pact. So then what? The ruling Popular Party, the government which is in a transitional stage, is still opting for the great pact between Ciudada-
nos and PSOE. The problem is that neither party wants Mariano Rajoy to continue as prime minister in which he insists. There have even been calls within the PP that he must step aside. We are all back to square one. The political parties don't seem to be too concerned that the gruelling process will have to continue, even after the next elections, if there is
fishermen after Spain joined the European Union in 1986, when already depleted fish stocks were finally protected by the imposition of fishing quotas. This was bad news for the Vidals. Realising the family business needed to expand or die, they teamed up with Antonio Perez, a fellow Riviera fisherman who had worked in the lucrative toothfish industry off the coast of Argentina. “If you go back to the 80s and 90s off the Falklands, Spain has always had a hand in the toothfish industry,” Captain Chakravarty told the Olive Press from his boat, currently in the South China Seas, chasing a band of illegal shark fisherman. “When the Spanish fishing business started to collapse it seemed like a really good business to go into. The Vidals had the money to stay one step ahead.” With toothfish in plentiful supply in French waters in the
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A campaigning, community newspaper, the Olive Press represents the huge expatriate community in southern Spain - 200,000 copies distributed monthly (130,000 digitally) with an estimated readership, including the website, of more than 500,000 people a month.
August 6th - August 2015 www.theolivepress.es 66 March19th 30th - April 12th 2016
FEATURE
MA
6
MADRIDS MATTER no real winner. The 2016 budgets have been passed so we seemed covered for the rest of the year. Not really a fine way of looking at things. But politicians want to play politics, it is part of their blood. They must broker that tiny compromise before they can satisfactorily say they hammered out deal.