Tempest in a wine glass: Valencia councillor caught shopping for drinks during flood aid meeting

A councillor in Valencia was caught shopping for wine online during a meeting to discuss extra funding for communities devastated by deadly floods that struck Spain in October.

During a Valencia city council plenary session on Tuesday, José Marí Olano was captured on a livestream scrolling through bottles of wine on an alcohol website and adding them to his basket.

Olano's wine shopping was reported at the time by the news outlet eldiario.es and it fuelled both amusement and anger on social media. After other lawmakers mentioned the incident during the plenary, Olano — a member of the centre-right People's Party (PP) — stood up at the end of the session to apologise for his "incorrect" behaviour.

"I apologise publicly to all of you and the citizens, whom we all represent," he said.

Opposition lawmakers were quick to condemn Olano's actions.

"When you think you can't get any more indignant, a PP councillor from Valencia appears buying wine online in the middle of the debate [on the floods]," said Borja Sanjuán of the ruling Socialist Party (PSOE). "It is also striking that he is always on his laptop during the plenary sessions. But I didn't expect him to be buying wine," he added.

Papi Robles of the leftist Compromís coalition said that Olano's online wine shopping during the plenary was "one of the saddest things I have ever seen in politics in my life".

Valencia's city council approved an additional €25 million at the session to fund reconstruction efforts in the areas hit hardest by October's flooding.

The floods on 29 October killed at least 225 people in eastern Spain, damaging countless homes and destroying vehicles. In some towns, the heavy downpours that caused the floods dropped as much as a year’s worth of rain in just eight hours.

In early November, as Spaniards' shock at the wreckage turned into anger, a political blame game began, directed particularly at regional authorities who had failed to send timely emergency alerts to cell phones on the day of the floods.

Valencia's leader Carlos Mazón — who is also a PP politician — came under fire and faced protests calling for his resignation after local media reported that he enjoyed a three-hour lunch with a journalist on 29 October as the flood waters were surging.