Goodbye, Iberdrola?

This editorial by Pedro Miguel appeared in the July 25, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.

The Spanish company Iberdrola, which was, along with Repsol, the regime’s favorite during Felipe Calderón’s spurious presidency, has a formidable international presence in nearly 15 countries, its assets valued at more than €150 billion, employing some 40,000 people, supplying electricity to around 100 million. It operates hundreds of power plants of all types, from coal-fired to nuclear and modern hybrid solar-wind farms. It has also expanded into grid operations, electric vehicle charging stations, gas sales, data centers, artificial intelligence, and real estate businesses, both industrial and residential, among other areas.

Iberdrola presents itself as a champion of renewable energy (photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric, green hydrogen), says it is committed to Sustainable Development Goals, to good governance practices, to ethics and transparency; in the countries where it operates, it deploys enormous image-washing operations: it boasts of supporting vulnerable groups, of promoting the fight against energy poverty, of promoting Olympic and Paralympic sport and of helping female athletes; in short: Iberdrola is Mother Teresa of Calcutta reincarnated as an multinational energy corporation.

Behind the facade of a flower-eating conglomerate and welfare society, Iberdrola has been both a generator and beneficiary of corruption, abuse, theft, interference, and environmental damage in the countries in which it operates, starting with its home country: Spain.

Since 2015, the Spanish Tax Agency has reported a network of “commissions” paid to officials in Castile and León totaling approximately €110 million. That year, the corporation was fined €25 million for fraudulently manipulating electricity prices. In 2019, the conglomerate’s then-head of Corporate Control, José Antonio del Olmo, drafted an internal report highlighting the company’s practice of bribing and extorting politicians on the orders of Iberdrola’s chairman, Ignacio Sánchez Galán. This document earned Antonio del Olmo a lawsuit for “serious slander and libel.”

Furthermore, it was discovered that Iberdrola had hired a police chief, a certain Commissioner Villarejo, to provide information on politicians, executives of rival corporations, and environmental groups who were being recruited to organize protests against Iberdrola’s competitors. For these crimes, the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office requested a 59-year prison sentence for the public servant and 45 for Iberdrola’s head of security. Similar cases have occurred in other countries. 

Additionally, the Spanish-born multinational has engaged in deceitful and fraudulent conduct in the countries where it operates. In Guatemala, for example, it sought to challenge the state’s power to set electricity rates. It filed two international lawsuits against the Central American country’s government and lost both. 

In Mexico, Iberdrola made fantastic profits thanks to the corruption of the regimes of Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón, and Enrique Peña Nieto. Sample: “Iberdrola would collect its first billion euros in business history in 2003, from its profits in Mexico, after obtaining a $457 million loan from the Inter-American Development Bank in 2000 to build a combined-cycle natural gas power plant in Monterrey (Femsa-Titán), and another in Altamira, Tamaulipas, with the backing of the Federal Electricity Commission, through a 25-year energy sales contract.”

In June 2002, the Federal Audit Office investigated allegations of alleged irregularities by Iberdrola in obtaining permits granted by the now-defunct Energy Regulatory Commission. The results revealed that the Spanish company had failed to comply with agreements regarding energy production and the completion of works.

To date, the Spanish corporation owes our country a fine of 9.145 billion pesos for illegal energy sales. Since it would be impossible to summarize them here, we suggest consulting an account of the Spanish consortium’s misdeeds in our country in a report by Avispa Midia and a program on La Base.

For now, Iberdrola’s exit from Mexico is a rumor spread by the Spanish media outlet El Confidencial. In my opinion, if the exit were to materialize, it would be cause for a national holiday.