In the last seven years, the Xunta de Galicia has paid 782,666.5 euros in 272 contracts awarded by hand to the brother of the president’s right-hand man. The businessman in question is called Joaquín Cuíña. Her sister, Beatriz Cuíña, is the general secretary of the Presidency of Alfonso Rueda, with whom she has worked closely since his arrival to the Xunta in 2009, first as councilor of Alberto Núñez Feijóo, then as vice president and since May 2022 as head of the Galician executive.
Cuíña’s company has managed to convince 24 departments of the regional administration so that between 2018 and 2024 they have commissioned it to process the registration of trademarks related to the policies of the Galician Government; from the names of the different roads of Santiago to elderly care programs such as “Porta a porta”. If something has a name and logo, the businessman is there to register the trademark and get paid for it.
Joaquín Cuíña’s hand in obtaining orders and money does not seem to clash with the partitions that separate the offices of San Caetano, headquarters of the Galician Government. According to the investigation carried out by elDiario.es, his influence expanded to more than twenty entities throughout the autonomous administration with managers who thought of him every time the need to register a new brand arose. It started when Núñez Feijóo was president of the Government and has continued since Rueda reached the top of the Xunta.
The Galician Institute for Economic Promotion, Vivenda eo Solo, Portos de Galicia and many other organizations agreed in seeing the brother of Alfonso Rueda’s right-hand man as the ideal person to entrust these procedures to, always with contracts in hand. He was entrusted with tasks such as renewing the rights to the Pelegrín brand, the historic mascot of Xacobeo 93, now in disuse, or registering the Xacobeo brand in countries such as Japan or Korea. The fever for registration seemed to have no end to the point of patenting the “Galicia” brand. When that license approached its expiration, Cuíña renewed the permits and issued the corresponding invoice. The last one, for 4,356 euros.
Of all the departments that called his phone, the Galician Tourism Agency stands out. With this entity alone, Joaquín Cuíña chained a whopping 103 contracts for seven years for an amount of 334,134.02 euros. This department depends directly on the presidency of the Xunta headed by Alfonso Rueda and in charge of its engine room is the sister of the businessman who received those funds.
Easy work
The businessman’s work does not involve any apparent difficulty. It is an administrative task for which it is enough to know what forms you must fill out and where to send the request. To register a trademark in Spain, payment of a fee of 125 euros is required. If the request is at the European level, that payment amounts to 850. Therefore, the rates that Cuiña billed the administration varied from 800 euros for some small procedures to more than 10,000 euros for others. Of the 272 invoices studied (2018-2024), the most frequent range between 2,500 and 3,000 euros.
The contracts began to be chained in 2018 and have continued until today. They affect four and a half years of Núñez Feijóo’s presidency and two and a half of Rueda’s term. Beatriz Cuíña, the businessman’s sister, was in positions of responsibility all that time, first as general secretary of the vice presidency held by Rueda himself and now with the same position but a little higher up, the president’s right hand.
Accustomed to the carpets of San Caetano for years, Beatriz Cuíña began her career in the legal service of the Department of Public Works (COTOPV), which for so long was directed by a deceased historic leader of the PP with whom she shared the last name, Xosé Cuíña. She was general secretary of the Instituto Galego da Vivenda eo Solo for seven years. He spent another two in the deputy secretary general of the Ministry of the Environment. The arrival of the bipartite PSOE-BNG Government temporarily removed her from San Caetano. During two of those years in office (2007-2009) he moved to Ourense as vice-manager on the campus that the University of Vigo has in this city.
But 2009 arrived, the PP regained power and Alfonso Rueda called her after becoming part of the first Feijóo Government. From that moment she would become the trusted plumber of the current president of the Xunta and his right hand. It has been 15 years with control in the square but away from the spotlight and public exposure. Those who frequently inhabit the corridors between the highest offices of the Xunta de Galicia know that she is among those who most command the main ship of the Galician Government. One of those people summarizes it like this in conversation with this editorial team: “Beatriz is the one who cuts the cod, the councilors limit themselves to bringing the tobacco.”
When Feijóo was still in charge of the Xunta, five contracts from Beatriz Cuíña’s brother were signed in the vice presidency, the department in which she herself held the general secretary. For a total of 13,637 euros, two of them correspond to the year 2019: one, to register OGVX and CGM patents and brands. The other is described with a generic “trademark processing before the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office”. In 2020, the registration of the EMEGA brand appears, a line of aid for women entrepreneurs and businesswomen; the Sementes brand goes to Igualdade and the Emilia Pardo Bazán Medal.
Cuíña’s business has been around for ten years and is called Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas SL. Its headquarters are located on the first floor of a residential building in the center of Santiago de Compostela without any type of plaque that identifies his company. At the time of its creation, the businessman contributed the legal minimum required to create a business: 3,000 euros. In seven years of dealings with the administration where his sister works, his turnover with the Galician Xunta alone multiplied by 260 the amount he contributed at the time of founding his company.
The figures that appear in the accounts of Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas are typical of a micro-SME, with very reduced activity, a declared profit that, at most, has amounted to barely 23,951.55 euros (in 2021) and a very high dependence on which invoices the Xunta for its work before the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (OEPM). From 2018 to 2023, the company has never had more than two employees on staff, according to its accounts available in the Commercial Registry, and has invoiced a total of just over one million euros in those years. Specifically, 1,005,073.14 euros.
In that period, the minor contracts that the Xunta has awarded to Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas have amounted (VAT included) to 696,761 euros. This represents 69.3% of the company’s entire turnover in those years.
The best year for the micro-SME managed by the brother of the general secretary of the Xunta was 2021, when Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas invoiced 223,474.08 euros. That year, with the Xunta still chaired by Feijóo, the Galician government commissioned him with minor contracts for a record amount of 191,487 euros, VAT included. This figure represented 85.7% of the company’s turnover that year.
“This is surprising me”
elDiario.es has contacted the businessman, who was driving his vehicle at the time of receiving the call. As a first reaction, Joaquín Cuíña has assured the following: “What are you talking about, 700,000 euros? That information is not correct, are you telling me that I am already retired?” After explaining that the data comes from a public source, Cuíña argued the following: “I don’t usually talk about this on the phone and, furthermore, what you are telling me is surprising me.” The next thing was an offer to postpone the conversation: “Let me come and I’ll call you, I’m going to see a client. Let me get to a gas station, I’ll stop the car and we’ll talk in half an hour.” That communication never occurred. An hour later, the businessman had closed his Facebook and modified his WhatsApp status to delete his photo and replace it with a landscape.
A spokesperson for the Galician Government has pointed out to this editorial team that the office of the president’s secretary’s brother “is one of the 10 with which the Xunta de Galicia worked in recent years”: “As with the other companies specialized in “In the field of patents and trademarks, the commissioning of these works was made using the minor contract formula, included in current legislation.” Alfonso Rueda’s team defends the legality of some orders that, they claim, were intended to “monitor the brands used by the administration to prevent fraudulent use of them and confuse citizens.”
Precedents
It is not the first time that someone related to the power of the PP in the Xunta takes money from the patents commissioned by the Galician administration. In 2007, the newspaper El País reported that a lawyer linked to Xesús Pérez Varela, the councilor who revolutionized the Xacobeo phenomenon for Manuel Fraga, was making a splash registering patents linked to the Camino de Santiago. The methodology of that scandal and this one is the same: small contracts of less than 12,000 euros, which are awarded directly without competition but which, added to each other, end up creating exorbitant billing figures far from control and transparency.
To prepare this information, elDiario.es has studied the data on minor contracts that are hosted on the Xunta’s Transparency Portal. It is a search of enormous difficulty since this portal is designed for the opposite that it proclaims: it does not allow queries by NIF, it forces you to review one by one the management centers that govern these small items of up to 15,000 euros, it only offers the data from the last quarters and prevents exporting the information obtained for processing.
There is no trace of minor contracts awarded to the The last contract with Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas was published on that website less than a month ago, on September 16.
investigation commission
The information revealed by elDiario.es comes at a time when the Xunta’s contracts with relatives of its leaders are at the center of the debate. On September 23, the Galician Parliament established the commission of inquiry into public procurement of the regional administration, which this Tuesday will approve its operating rules.
The BNG used its 25 deputies – the third of the chamber required by the regulations – to promote, despite the PP’s initial veto, a body that, under that generic name, will investigate, among other issues, the contracts between the autonomous administration and the company Eulen, of which Micaela Núñez Feijóo, the sister of the leader of the PP and former president of the Xunta, is a delegate for the Northwest. In 15 years they rose to 54 million euros.
Neither Feijóo nor his successor at the head of the Galician government, Alfonso Rueda, have yet clarified whether they will appear before the camera, although Rueda has already announced that he “would have no problem” in doing so. After this Tuesday’s meeting of the commission – in which the PP, after failing to stop it, has secured the presidency – the period for proposals for the work plan will open. It will contain both the documentation and the appearances that the groups will request. The nationalists hope that the plan will be approved this October.
Source: www.eldiario.es
