The nexus between land/building/lending booms and outright corruption continues to be an underexplored subject in the economics profession. Today’s data point comes to us from Spain, where center-right prime minister Mariano Rajoy is being hit with allegations of secret personal payments to him from party donors. The allegations are in Spain’s El Pais, which has published copies of handwritten secret accounting books “which the newspaper said amounted to a parallel unofficial bookkeeping system - show donations from companies, mostly builders, and regular payments of thousands of euros to a number of party leaders.”
You can get the whole El Pais story here if you read Spanish.
