Jolt for Aida's operatic lifestyle

FOR THE daughter of a doorman and a char lady who started as a secretary at Socialist Party headquarters, Aida Alvarez did all right for herself. She was reckoned to be a dollar millionaire by the time she was 28.

Recently, she has been lying low, donning a rubber witch's mask to hide from photographers when venturing from her luxury villa in Madrid's posh Chamartin suburb, a villa best known for the refrigerated room that houses her collection of fur coats.

The paparazzi are there because judges investigating alleged illegal financing of Felipe Gonzalez's Socialist Party in the early Eighties believe Ms Alvarez, now 35, may have been the mysterious 'Black Lady', also codenamed 'Opera' in numerous documents, alleged to have run a campaign to collect illegal donations from banks, businesses and assorted wealthy Spaniards and foreigners seeking political influence.

As with many other past Socialist Party employees, from secretaries to ministers, Ms Alvarez appeared to gather personal wealth at astonishing speed. There was not only the villa, with its sauna, jacuzzi and servants, but another luxurious flat and a country house with swimming pool.

A company of which Ms Alvarez was director was shown to have received more than pounds 130,000 from the German firm Siemens, which headed a consortium that won lucrative contracts involving the high-speed Madrid-Seville train link set up for the Expo '92 exhibition.

Together with the centrally heated kennel found to be keeping the family dog cosy in the luxurious villa of the former Socialist economy minister, Carlos Boyer, the cooled fur coat room became a symbol of the rags-to-riches Socialists.

The photographers may not have to doorstep Ms Alvarez's villa much longer. Yesterday, Madrid's City Hall, run by Mr Gonzalez's arch-enemy, the conservative Popular Party, gave Ms Alvarez two weeks to tear it down. Well, to tear down 90 per cent of it, to be precise, the part adjudged to have been built in open defiance of local construction laws.

City Hall also ordered Ms Alvarez to pay a 17m-peseta ( pounds 85,000) fine for demolishing the property that had existed on the site, not far from Real Madrid's Bernabeu stadium. She has the right to appeal, and is thought likely to try to stall the demolition order.