Mazón now admits that he went to his office after lunch and before going to Cecopi on the day of the raid.

Four months after torrential rains devastated dozens of towns in Valencia, causing the death of 224 people (another three are still missing) and tens of thousands of euros in losses, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, has considered that it is time to give some information about what he did in the crucial hours of the flood. Until this week, hardly any explanation had come out of the mouth of the head of the Valencian Government. This Monday, from a hotel in Madrid, he reported on the calls he made between five and eight in the evening , data that he refused to provide in the Valencian Parliament. This Tuesday he said that, after the meal he shared with a journalist at the El Ventorro restaurant in Valencia, he returned to his office in the Palau de la Generalitat, where he was until he moved to Cecopi, the emergency coordination body, in l'Eliana, some 20 kilometres from the capital.

Sources close to the president of the Generalitat already indicated in November that Mazón had gone to the Palau after lunch . However, the leader of the PP had never explicitly supported this version, in the same way that he has never reported at what time he arrived at the Ventorro, at what time he left the establishment and at what time he arrived at the Cecopi. Now, according to Carlos Mazón himself, it is time to say that he was in the office in the afternoon, but not to report at what time he arrived at the meeting on the catastrophe “out of respect for justice”, as he dared to say this morning. “I am looking forward to explaining it”, he added and insisted that he will first inform the judge who is investigating whether there was any negligence in the management of the damage. “We always want to have the utmost respect for the judge's requirements, not like others”, he declared.

According to his own call details from that day, he spoke to the Minister of Emergencies, Salomé Pradas, at 19.43, and was asked if he was not yet at the Cecopi and what time he arrived, but he did not respond out of “respect for the judicial process”. “We do not want to condition the judge's activity”, he said.

Carlos Mazón has made another dialectical pirouette when he was asked to evaluate the latest ruling by the judge who insists that the competence in matters of civil protection is autonomous. The leader of the PP maintains the thesis that in the Cecopi there was a shared responsibility with the Government because the norm speaks of a co-direction under a single command, which corresponds to the Generalitat.

“Do you still maintain that the decisions were made jointly and that there was no single command?” Mazón was asked in reference to the judge’s ruling. “Well, it is compatible. I think the law and the regulations clearly state this. There is co-management, there is the ability to make decisions jointly, and there is a command, there is a presidency of Cecopi and this single command is shared with the co-management,” he said, wanting to argue his thesis.

After visiting the Cevisama tile fair, Mazón went to a pharmacy in the nearby town of Paterna, which had just installed the new telematic system for dispensing medicines designed by the Department of Health. There, a client, Matilde Pardo, a 61-year-old resident of Aldaia who was in the establishment, confronted the president when she saw him enter and demanded an explanation for his absence during the management of the flood while people were drowning and he was “eating somewhere”. The client said that she had lost a house in Chiva and another in Aldaia, although she was able to recover this one, as well as five cars.

As soon as a larger than usual police presence was detected on the street, several neighbours stopped on the pavements. First to ask what was happening and then some stayed waiting for Mazón, who was greeted with shouts of “resign”, “murderer” and “shameless”, which were repeated when he left. A young man, on the other hand, tried to silence the proclamations by shouting louder against the Government of the socialist Pedro Sánchez for turning Spain “into Venezuela”.