Zapatero's daughters' firm served as financial hub for father's influence network

A company registered in August 2019 with three thousand euros in capital grew into something far more substantial. By 2024, Whathefav—owned by the daughters of former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero—was pulling in nearly half a million euros annually. The trajectory alone might have seemed unremarkable for a successful startup. But the client list told a different story entirely.

Every major client on Whathefav's roster occupied some corner of Zapatero's sphere of influence. The company worked for Público, a newspaper launched during his presidency. It served Neox, a channel owned by Atresmedia. It provided services to Elplural.com, a digital outlet that had remained active throughout the years since Zapatero left office, staffed by figures who had worked directly in his administration. Looking at the logos displayed on the company's website was, in effect, looking at a map of the former president's network.

Zapatero had always understood the power of controlling narrative. Unlike some of his predecessors, he made media strategy a cornerstone of his time in power. During his presidency, he cultivated relationships with key figures in Spanish broadcasting—José Miguel Contreras of Globomedia and Jaume Roures of Mediapro among them. Both had shaped LaSexta in its early years. Roures had founded Público during that same period. These were not casual friendships. They were structural relationships that shaped which stories got told and how.

The financial mechanics of Whathefav, according to a judge's ruling, operated as what might be called a redistribution mechanism. The company received funds from clients and other corporate entities, then moved money through its accounts in patterns that suggested something more complex than straightforward service provision. Nearly a quarter million euros came from Análisis Relevante, a firm founded by Julio Martínez. Sergio Sánchez, a former CNI executive and Indra official, collected eighteen thousand euros from this arrangement for writing reports. Sánchez had joined Movistar+, a Telefónica subsidiary, just weeks after Javier de Paz—an old friend of Zapatero's and former Socialist Youth leader—was named president of the telecommunications company.

One client name appeared on Whathefav's roster but received less scrutiny than others: Grupo AGEM. The company operates across Africa and Latin America in sectors ranging from healthcare to infrastructure. Its founder, Pedro Hermosilla, had been imprisoned in Cuba in 2009 on corruption charges before Miguel Ángel Moratinos, then Spain's foreign minister, traveled to the island and secured his release. Moratinos later served as board member and president of Lindmed Trade, a firm connected to AGEM's operations.

AGEM's recent history carried its own weight. In Bolivia, the company had served as intermediary in a pandemic-era respirator purchase that cost the government roughly ten and a half million dollars in overcharges. The ventilators, bought at thirty-five thousand dollars each, had a real manufacturing and transport cost of under thirteen thousand. Two years later, an AGEM representative participated in a Spain-Angola business forum during a presidential visit by Pedro Sánchez. By 2023, AGEM had secured ninety-two million dollars in contracts in Angola through simplified adjudication procedures justified on grounds of external financing.

The network that Zapatero built during his presidency never truly dissolved. Names recur across its nodes—some writing news, others occupying positions of influence. A daughter of Zapatero had worked for one of Contreras's companies before founding Whathefav. Contreras himself had grown considerably more powerful during the Sánchez administration, managing a production company that extracted twenty-eight million euros in contracts from Spanish public broadcasting before selling it to Prisa, where he maneuvered himself into editorial influence. The connections spiraled outward, each thread leading to another figure, another company, another transaction that sat at the intersection of business and politics. What remained unclear was whether Whathefav was simply a service provider to a well-connected circle, or something more deliberately constructed—a financial instrument designed to move resources through channels that would otherwise draw scrutiny.