MADRID (Reuters) - The head of the region of Madrid Cristina Cifuentes resigned on Wednesday after a turbulent month for the People's Party (PP) politician which included claims she had falsified her masters degree and been caught shoplifting in 2011. Yesterday morning, the online newspaper 'OK Diario' reported that the politician had been arrested by supermarket security guards in 2011 on suspicion of having shoplifted two pots of anti-ageing cream. “I took it by mistake, they told me and when I was leaving I paid,” Ms Cifuentes said in her resignation statement, shortly after the video was made public and had gone viral. A leading member of Spain's ruling Popular Party (PP), Cristina Cifuentes, has resigned as president of the Madrid region after a scandal over her allegedly fraudulent master's degree was compounded by revelations she had been arrested for shoplifting. Ms Cifuentes, tipped by many as a potential successor to Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy as leader of the PP, had stubbornly refused to resign even as a judicial investigation was launched into her master's degree in public law from the King Juan Carlos University in Madrid. Regional president Cristina Cifuentes has already been under pressure after a month-long controversy over a master's law degree granted to her by a public university, which faked professors' signatures after she apparently failed to attend most classes.
The President of the Community of Madrid, Cristina Cifuentes, resigns after the discovery of a video of her stealing anti-aging cream in a supermarket and after several weeks of controversy after it came to light that she obtained her master's degree fraudulently.