The Catholic University of San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM), a private and ultra-religious center close to Vox, is strengthening its tentacles in the Community of Madrid thanks to the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The UCAM belongs to the Mendoza family, followers of the ‘Kikos’, the ultra-conservative religious movement Neocatechumenal Way, of Kiko Argüello. He has just inaugurated what he presented years ago as the “University of Sports”, in Torrejón de Ardoz, and participates together with the Ayuso Government in a non-profit entity, Fundación Resetea, which seeks financing and locations to build on the outskirts of the capital, preferably around the M-50 ring road, a “Campus for Life” dedicated to serving people with disabilities.
According to documentation to which elDiario.es has had access, Resetea requested at the beginning of 2023 the “free” transfer of a huge plot of land in Boadilla del Monte to build the complex and estimated the investment at 120 million euros. The project has been discarded after, according to some sources, municipal technicians warned of the legal risk of this operation. The Boadilla City Council recognizes meetings and contacts and says that it did not open a file on this matter.
UCAM was, along with other private health and education groups, one of Equipo Economico’s largest clients. The office of the scandal of alleged influence peddling of the former popular minister Cristóbal Montoro collected 395,670 euros from the UCAM until 2019, according to the case summary. The UCAM has justified these payments by being “immersed for years in a process of national and international expansion and to this end it has contracted consulting services in various areas, which with the Economic Team were previously on economic-financial viability.”
In Madrid, this expansion is bearing fruit, as shown by its recently inaugurated campus specialized in health, nutrition and sports in Torrejón (141,047 inhabitants), a dormitory city east of Madrid that the PP has governed since 2007. The UCAM had been trying to implement it in several locations since 2013 (in Madrid, it tried in Alcorcón when the mayor was the popular David Pérez), allied with the Spanish Olympic Committee (COE) and the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF) of the controversial Ángel María Villar.
Finally, the Ayuso Government authorized that center in Torrejón in July 2024, in which the UCAM and the COE are allied with another client of Montoro’s office, the private healthcare group Ribera Salud. A few days ago, the Madrid Department of Education published the order authorizing the start of activities “and the implementation of the Degree in Food Science and Technology”, specifying that its advertising “must include the authorized name, that is “Alma Mater Higher Education Centre”, and cannot use another name to refer to itself”. Nothing about the “University of Sports” that UCAM used when presenting the project and that the Torrejón City Council has promoted.
This new campus is joined by a philanthropic project related to sports (an activity in which UCAM has been a leader for years) promoted by the Resetea Foundation, in which the UCAM, the Department of the Presidency of the Community of Madrid, Acciona Construction and the CEOE Foundation are patrons. The entity plans “the construction, management and operation of a multi-use complex for people with disabilities,” as announced by the Ayuso Government in October 2022.
Named “Campus for Life”, it will be a large social-health and educational center open to people with disabilities and the general public. Asked about its participation in the project and the million-dollar disbursement that it would entail, the UCAM has not responded to elDiario.es. Neither has the Community of Madrid.
Despite the presence of the Ayuso Government on its board, the project, a “pioneer” in Spain, will be “100% private,” emphasizes the president of the CEOE Foundation, Fátima Báñez, on the phone. Behind him “there are no benefits,” emphasizes the former Minister of Labor. “No disbursement” has yet been made to get it started, according to the employers.
“If there was a profit motive behind it, I would be the first to leave,” explains the president and main promoter of Resetea, Dr. Tomás Fernández, chief medical officer of the Spanish Paralympic team in the last four Olympics and with first-hand knowledge of the reality of disabled people. Fernández speaks with passion about his idea: to “reset” the lives of these people to open new opportunities for them and accompany them (also their families) in a situation that, he emphasizes, affects 10% of the Spanish population and in developed countries is often caused, for example, by traffic accidents or accidents.
Surrounded by portraits with Paralympic athletes in his office at the CEMTRO private clinic, of which he is founder and medical director, Fernández, secretary of the medical commission of the Professional Football League (LFP), attributes the presence of UCAM in this project to its strong connection with the world of sports.
Olympic champion students such as Ruth Beitia (athletics), Carolina Martín (badminton) and Saúl Craviotto (canoeing) have been students there. And he did not make his debut with the senior team, but a former UCAM employee and former UCAM Murcia Basketball player is José Ángel Antelo, president of Vox in Murcia, former regional vice president and one of the most visible faces of the far-right formation’s links with this educational center.
Dr. Fernández explains that he began to conceive his project around 2018. In 2023 he planned to establish himself in Boadilla, a municipality where he has been a neighbor for decades and the headquarters of the foundation. That location has been “discarded” and the project has been resized and is less ambitious.
In that town of 65,839 inhabitants, one of the richest in Spain and governed decades ago by the PP, Resetea requested the “free” transfer of a huge plot of 193,451 square meters by “direct award.” In a document that he presented in January 2023, he proposed this “demanial concession” for an indefinite period. After him, the facilities would be delivered “free of charge” to the city council, “which would obviously produce a very beneficial effect for the community.”
As it is a heritage asset of the City Council, this land is reserved for public use provisions raised by the City Council, or it can be transferred to a third party. The usual thing is to do it in exchange for an annual fee for a period of between 50 and 75 years. And always after the corresponding public tender, sources from the Boadilla City Council explain.
Aborted tender
The plot requested by the foundation of which UCAM, the Community of Madrid, CEOE Foundation and Acciona Construction are part is EQ-1, in the unconsolidated urban land sector AH-7 “Viñas Viejas”, very close to the M-50. On that site, the Boadilla City Council launched a tender at the end of 2021 to build an athletics track, an outdoor archery field, multipurpose courts, a children’s playground, a path jogging and a Youth Space. The works were budgeted at 12.16 million.
In November 2023, ten months after Fundación Resetea asked for those 19 hectares for free, the council renounced the contract for the parceling, execution, activity and construction management projects. According to City Hall sources, this athletics track was unviable due to the “unevenness” of the terrain.
Dr. Fernández explains that, with Boadilla ruled out, they are considering a much more modest complex: from an Olympic athletics track for major sporting events, to a smaller indoor one. From 19 hectares, to “between 4 and 6 hectares.” The investment, he says, is to be determined, and financing must be obtained.
The Resetea project in Boadilla estimated the investment to build the buildings and develop the land at 119,788,950 euros, which “will be financed in its entirety with non-refundable financing.” And “for the maintenance and operation of the facilities, a series of ordinary income is expected to be obtained” in the form of “rental of both sports and administrative spaces, operation of restaurants, income derived from the care offered by the complex open to both resident disabled patients, users of the facilities and the general public, etc.”, as well as “from contributions derived from Patronage programs.”
He added that the foundation “not only has its assets to carry out the Project, but also a forecast of income or income to be received from its exploitation” which “has no other purpose than to continue contributing to the foundation’s purposes or, in other words, to purposes that benefit the general interest.” Resetea’s statutes require it to allocate 70% of its accounting results to these purposes.
Fernández explains that they have received signs of interest from authorities in Ukraine or Brazil. And it disassociates Resetea from the CEMTRO clinic. Its founder, the octogenarian traumatologist from Murcia Pedro Guillén (a pioneer in introducing the technique of arthroscopy in Spain), is honorary dean of the Degree in Medicine at the UCAM and director of its Chair of Sports Traumatology.
CEMTRO has several agreements with another ultra-religious private university, Francisco de Vitoria, of the Legionaries of Christ, based in Pozuelo, where one of its clinics is located. Among CEMTRO’s partners is the insurer Mapfre (24%). Alicia Alcocer Koplowitz, daughter of the billionaire former president of FCC, Esther Koplowitz, who represents her patrimonial EAC, sits on its board. Also Montserrat Fraile, wife of the well-known sports journalist José María García.
“Marriage sciences”
Resetea’s letter to the Boadilla City Council dates from January 20, 2023, two days after the death from cancer of the founder of the UCAM, the ultra-conservative and controversial businessman José Luis Mendoza, one of the natural patrons of the Resetea Foundation. Mendoza went viral in 2020 with his warnings about a chip [“chís”] to control the population that was going to be implanted with the coronavirus vaccines, which he attributed to “dark forces of evil” and a conspiracy by Bill Gates and George Soros.
If the Resetea project bears fruit, the UCAM will continue to spread its tentacles in Madrid, after that campus in Torrejón and the new section of the Pontifical John Paul II Theological Institute, a training center for religious that opened in the capital in October 2019 to “spread the sciences of marriage and family throughout the world.”
With more than 21,000 students enrolled, according to its website, UCAM grew in Murcia in the heat of the enormous facilities of successive PP governments and in recent years it has strengthened ties with Vox. Its owner is a foundation chaired by Mendoza’s widow, Dolores García Mascarell, president of the UCAM, and who had 14 children with Mendoza. One of his sons-in-law is the current deputy spokesperson for Vox in the Regional Assembly, Rubén Martínez Alpáñez, who graduated in Law and completed a master’s degree at UCAM.
Source: www.eldiario.es
