“Investigators calculate that she and other family members accumulated about $24 million, mostly from shady land deals during Spain’s boom years. Searching her property, the police had to borrow a bill-counting machine from a local bank to help total up all the cash: $485,000. At a time when Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal are imposing deficit-cutting austerity plans on their hard-pressed citizens, these revelations of widespread political corruption are stoking bitter resentment, destabilizing governments and undermining the credibility of the political class as a whole.”
