'Dinero Negro'

'Dinero negro' or black money is the talk of the 'steamie' in Spain at the moment - because many leading officials in the Spanish Government's party (the PP or People's Party) - have been accused of accepting payments from a secret slush fund on which they paid no tax. allegedly.

Now at a time when people in Spain - just as in the UK - are 'all in this together' revelations of secret tax free payments - from a Swiss bank account no less - could be enough to bring the the Spanish Prime Minister (Mariano Rajoy) and his government crashing down.

The whole business reads like a script from a Holywoood movie - The Untouchables, if you ask me - because in the Brian de Palma version starring Sean Connery and Kevin Costner - the man who 'does for' Al Capone (played by Robert de Niro) - is an accountant who kept his own set of books which led to his boss's downfall.

So the Mafia mobster was not sent to jail for murder - as everyone knows thanks to The Untouchables - but for fraud and failing to pay his taxes to the US Treasury 

The same thing appears to be happening in the Spanish PP - if these allegations are true.

Because the party's former treasurer - a shady character named Barcenas - is on trial in a separate corruption scandal - and in the course of this legal action certain documents have emerged which seem to implicate the Spanish Prime Minister and his People's Party.

But that's not the really big story - the really big story is that tax evasion is Spain is endemic - so widespread in fact that everybody's at it up to and including the legal profession.

For example, when people buy or sell a property in Spain - there is a declared or official price - and another real price which the buyer actually pays.

The real price is say 100,000 Euros - but the official or declared price may be only   70,000 Euros - with the difference being payed to the seller in cash by the buyer - so that the seller keeps 30% of the sale price but without paying any tax.

And the laugh is that the lawyers - or notaries - who oversee the buying and selling process for both sides in Spain, unlike in the UK - know exactly what's going but conveniently look the other way when the 'dinero negro' cash changes hands.

Now this kind of behaviour would be impossible in the UK - although it is certainly rife in Spain and possibly many other Mediterranean countries as well. 

Just imagine how much tax has been unpaid and deliberately evaded - with all the property building that's gone on in Spain during the last twenty years - the mind boggles.

Yet the thing is it's happened under very government - of the both the left and the right - under the Socialists and Conservatives - and that's a much bigger scandal than the one threatening to engulf the People's Party at the moment.