SPAIN'S government has leaped to calm a growing corruption scandal over alleged undeclared payments in the ruling party, with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy set to speak out after being named in the affair.
The government run by Rajoy's conservative Popular Party insisted the publication of hand-written ledgers purportedly showing secret payments to Rajoy and other top party officials had not threatened its stability.
"The prime minister will make his position known tomorrow," Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria told a news conference on Friday.
"The government is one thing and the parties are another," she added. "This government enjoys great stability."
Rajoy, 57, called an extraordinary meeting of the party's national executive committee on Saturday, a party spokeswoman said earlier, after the report by leading daily El Pais ignited a political firestorm.
He will address the allegations after the meeting, Saenz de Santamaria said.Anger boiled over in the public and in the media over the allegations that the party had dished out undisclosed money from donors, including property developers, to Rajoy and other top party officials.
Popular Party secretary-general Maria Dolores de Cospedal on Thursday rejected the allegations, saying the ledgers were full of falsehoods, but she failed to stem the mushrooming scandal.
Rajoy's right-leaning government is imposing an austerity squeeze on Spaniards suffering a jobless rate of 26 per cent - the highest since the return of democracy after the death in 1975 of General Francisco Franco.
Hundreds of demonstrators rallied outside Popular Party headquarters in Madrid on Thursday night to denounce the supposed secret payments, chanting: "Thief" and "Resign" and calling Rajoy a "delinquent".
El Pais cited ledgers kept by two former party treasurers, Alvaro Lapuerta and Luis Barcenas, apparently showing payments including 25,200 euros a year to Rajoy between 1997 and 2008.
Most top officials named in the report said the allegations were false.
Barcenas, one of the supposed authors of the ledger, roundly denied the report, saying none of the payments listed by El Pais were actually made while he had oversight of the party's accounts.
Barcenas is already under investigation following reports he had stashed up to 22 million euros in Swiss bank accounts until 2009.
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