Spain 2008 News Review - October
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By h.b. - Dec 31, 2008 - 7:42 PM
Ryanair announce they are leaving Valencia, and later in the year add Fuerteventura to their departure list.

The cabinet approved the guarantee limit for savers extending the bank deposit guarantee to 100,000 € per bank. On the same day, October 10, the cabinet also approved the creation of an emergency 30 billion € fund for the purchase of financial assets if required.

Irishman, Michael Dermot McArdle, was found guilty of manslaughter and not murder by the Provincial Court in Málaga in a majority verdict from a jury which was announced on October 7. He was alleged to have thrown his wife, Kelly Anne, to her death from their fourth floor room of a Mabella hotel in 2000. Asked a series of questions by the judge, Fernando González, they agreed that she had fallen from the balcony during a row with her husband, but that he did not intend to kill her, and that he had made an attempt to stop her from falling.

A baby was born on the 12th of the month in Sevilla which had been genetically selected to provide the umbilical cord stem cells which could cure the serious hereditary illness, congenital anaemia, suffered by his brother.

The man who had been head of the employers’ organisation, CEOE, for 23 years, José María Cuevas, died on October 27.

The month ended with the rupture between the Partido Popular and the UPN party in the region of Navarra. It came after two members of the UPN failed to support the P.P. in the vote on the state budget.
The budget was rejected by the Senate, but approved in Congress when it was returned there in December.

October was also the month when the Bank of Spain confirmed the first quarter of ‘negative growth’ in Spain for 15 years.


The mother of Rocio Wanninkhof, the youngster from Mijas Costa who was murdered in October 1999, called in October for a new court case because she thinks that the man found guilty of killing of her daughter, the Briton Tony King, could not have acted alone.
The family lawyer has made an application to the Málaga Provincial Court to re-open the case, basing his arguments on the evidence from the case in which King was found guilty.
King was sentenced to 19 years in prison for the case, but the Wanninkhof family considers that two people would have been needed to carry out the crime and move the body. Lawyer Marcos García-Montes explained that they were not looking for new evidence, only to determine once and for all their ‘single obsession’ if Dolores Vázquez took part in the crime or not.
She is the woman who was a family friend, and had a lesbian relationship with Rocio’s mother and who was initially found guilty of the murder and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2001. Later that verdict was deemed as unsafe and overturned by the Andalucian High Court.

A coroner at an inquest in Bolton Town Hall has ruled in October that British businessman, Mark Langford from Congleton in Cheshire, did not commit suicide when he died in a single car accident on the A7 in Marbella in April 2007.
Langford was notorious for setting up the ‘no win, no fee’ The Accident Group, which first made him a multi-millionaire and the collapsed in 2003 in debts of 100 million pounds.
The inquest heard that Langford was diagnosed as being bipolar, and had treatment at The Priory Clinic in Hale and had been in hospital in Spain for six weeks.
His wife Debbie told the inquest that her husband suffered a downward spiral which started with the failure of his company.
However West Manchester Deputy Coroner, Alan Walsh, said that there had been signs he was on the way to recovery at the time of the accident, which was to be considered as such.

Ryanair announced in October that they would be closing their hub in Valencia following a row over funding with the regional Generalitat government. The Irish airline also announced in December that it would be pulling out of Fuerteventura, following the failure of a promotion deal for the island with local businesses. The airline also got involved in a row with Spanish internet portals which it later banned from selling its tickets.

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