Franco fortune causing controversy with his grandchildren

The Madrid Court has ordered the opening of proceedings for insults against reporters and interviewees who participated in a report on the fortune of Francisco Franco published in July 2018 in the programme ‘En el punto de mira’, by Cuatro.

Francisco Franco’s grandchildren have issued the complaint themselves.

After the initial hearing in the Provincial Court, that same court has agreed to summon this Thursday, August 27, as defendants, the president of Mediaset, Alejandro Echevarría; Cuatro’s programming director, Raúl López Palomar; the director of the program, Juan Serrano; the chain’s content press chief, Lorena Correa; and the reporters Pablo de Miguel, Juan Carlos González and Carla Sanz.

Also mentioned are the collaborators Javier Otero Bada and Jimmy Giménez-Arnau, the historian Carlos Babío and the writer Mariano Sánchez Soler, the latter authors of the books Meirás: un pazo, un caudillo, un plunder (Fund. Galiza Semper) and Los Franco SA (Oberon), respectively. All of them were interviewed in the report.

The report looked into the dictator’s inheritance and the businesses in which his descendants would have invested the money, along with the methods used to come to possess a patrimony with a value that would amount to €500 million.

In the lawsuit, six grandchildren of the dictator – Francisco, Jaime Felipe, María del Mar, María Aránzazu, José Cristóbal and María de la O – alleged that the programme had had a “clear defamatory and discrediting content” for them by collecting claims “that at no time conform to the truth” and in “manifestly false content.” In her opinion, the broadcast was “lacking in objectivity and impartiality” and was made with the aim of seeking “her personal discredit and censorship of her assets.”