The maneuvers that the senator’s entourage made to try to cover up an alleged case of sexual harassment of two of the councilors on his team continue to increasingly complicate the political horizon of the historic popular councilor. A position of trust in the City Council and leader of the PP of Malaga pressured one of the then councilors, Laura Ruiz, who was part of the WhatsApp group in which two other councilors recounted situations of harassment, not to say that the accusations were true, according to .
“Laura, the issue is that there are two people who hypothetically, according to the screenshots that are published, are the subject of sexual assault behavior, and in that chat you participate, as a listener, but you participate. These two people say that it is false. You cannot say that it is true. Am I explaining myself or not?” Borrego urges Ruiz.
According to the Andalusian newspaper, Borrego pressured Ruiz to sign a letter alleging a temporary “mental imbalance” just in the days in which he wrote messages against Landaluce on his social networks. In a statement from the Consistory, this Wednesday, the popular councilor assures that the complaint of pressure “lacks foundation.”
The meeting in which Ruiz was presented with that letter, which he did not sign, took place last February, the newspaper reports. That moment, in which alleged situations of sexual harassment are reported that were spread in October 2024. The author of the alleged pressure was Marcos Borrego, lawyer, position of trust in the Algeciras council and member of the executive of the PP of Malaga, and they were part of the attempt to put together Landaluce’s legal defense.
Finally, the PSOE of Algeciras did not formalize its complaint before the Prosecutor’s Office of the Supreme Court – given the senator’s privileged status – for embezzlement of public funds, influence peddling and sexual abuse until last December 9. in the party, but not from his public responsibilities as councilor and senator. The PP of Cádiz has already administratively processed a discharge that is not temporary, since that figure does not exist in the party’s rules, according to sources close to the formation.
This Wednesday, via a statement from the City Council, Landaluce acknowledged that the meeting between Ruiz and “his legal advisors at a private level” took place, but that the complaint of pressure “lacks foundation.” Along with the statement, the council has released an email sent by Laura Ruiz herself to Landaluce in October 2023 — 16 months before that meeting now discovered — in which the former councilor supposedly acknowledges having invented some public accusations against the councilor as a result of “despair.”
Sources from the PP in Malaga have assured that Borrego, Secretary of Electoral Training, did not act in his capacity as leader of the PP. “He has said that he acted as Landaluce’s lawyer,” the same sources explained. Landaluce is feeling the isolation of his party colleagues. Important leaders of the Andalusian PP and those around the president do not respond to his calls, according to sources from this party. The sources consulted hope that it will be the mayor himself who will take the initiative and leave his position as first mayor, informa Lourdes Lucio. At the last regional congress of the Andalusian PP, in November, the president of the Board and leader of the party, Juan Manuel Moreno, highlighted the good management of the councilor.
That was a boost after Landaluce found itself in the eye of the hurricane in October of last year, when WhatsApp screenshots were spread in which Susana Pérez – still a councilor in the council -, Eva Pajares – current territorial delegate of Health in Cádiz – and Laura Ruiz. The two politicians who were the alleged authors of those messages, Pérez and Pajares, signed a statement those days in which they called what was published “false news” and “distortion,” but they never denied that the messages were real. That leak was linked, in turn, to another previous scandal, which dates back to October 2022, when Ruiz publicly denounced that she had resigned due to pressure, after having been judicially convicted for publishing the phone number of her ex-husband’s lawyer on a gay contacts page.
That the PSOE complaint is for embezzlement is due to the fact that Ruiz ended up being hired in September 2023 as trusted personnel, first, and as a worker at a municipal residence, later. The letter released by Landaluce this Wednesday dates back to that moment in which she apologizes to the councilor for threatening months ago to call a press conference in which, supposedly, she was going to denounce events that occurred during her time as mayor. “I said it out of excessive desperation,” can be read in the letter that the mayor has released to shake off the pressure recorded on audio in the meeting between Borrego and Ruiz last February.
The atmosphere in the Algeciras City Council is more than tense since Landaluce became mayor not attached to the PP with his resignation, while the rest of his 15 councilors remain in the formation. Although from the outside everyone remains silent and seems to keep the ranks tight around him, cracks have already appeared in that containment dam of one of the longest-serving and most powerful PP mayors of the Cádiz PP. “He is exerting all the pressure in the world to make this happen and although, with his arrogance, he used to tell his councilors that they were there for him, the PP has reminded everyone that they owe their loyalty to the party, not to him,” says an opposition councilor who requests anonymity.
Landaluce has been mayor of Algeciras since 2011 and governs with a large absolute majority. Since he joined the then Popular Alliance in 1984, he has been everything: councilor in his city, general secretary of the Cádiz PP, deputy in Congress for Cádiz in two terms and senator since 2016. Added to this institutional label is a very personal way of doing politics in Algeciras. “It has always fostered a mistaken cult of the leader in which, in plenary sessions, its councilors seemed to fight over who thanked their mayor the most,” says a former opposition councilor. If there are no last minute changes, this coming Friday an ordinary plenary session will be convened in the Algeciras town hall. It will be time to check if those forces are still intact.
