The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) requested on Tuesday that judge Manuel García Castellón interrogate former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez, and Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo as suspects in relation to a conversation between them in which they plotted to gather information against the family of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, in order to destroy his reputation. These alleged plans between the Interior Ministry’s number two and the commissioner were recorded just a month after Sánchez won the leadership of the PSOE in a primary election. The National Court has been investigating since September 2022 the corruption audios published by EL PAÍS in which Commissioner Villarejo was seen conspiring with various PP party leaders and Interior Ministry officials to discredit Catalan separatists, Podemos leaders, or to search for evidence of illegal financing by the PP party while hiding it from the judge handling the case. The material gathered by the judge for his investigation includes a nearly two-hour conversation from August 22, 2014 in which the then Interior Ministry’s number two, Francisco Martínez, suggested that knowledge of the business dealings of Pedro Sánchez’s father-in-law could be “deadly” for the President’s career and encouraged the commissioner to gather more information. Months before the 2015 general elections, where Pedro Sánchez was leading the PSOE list, news about his father-in-law’s business dealings emerged. The PSOE denounced in its letter to the judge that “the investigation conducted by Interior Ministry officials, using public funds, had solely partisan purposes, and had no relation to the legal functions assigned to the Ministry of the Interior, as it did not affect state security.”
Judge García Castellón requested a report from the Internal Affairs Unit of the Police regarding the “criminal relevance” of the audios published by EL PAÍS at the beginning of this investigation. The police leadership of the Interior Ministry, under the orders of PP party officials, conducted various secret operations behind the back of the judge currently investigating the case based on information published in the newspaper. Some of these operations include: Operation Catalonia, where several commissioners participated without a judicial mandate but with the knowledge of top Interior Ministry officials, from the end of 2012 to late 2017, in an attempt to discredit Catalan separatist leaders. The audios published by EL PAÍS date back to November 2012, when Catalonia was preparing for early elections that sparked the independence movement. Villarejo leaked to El Mundo, as he acknowledged in conversation with Francisco Martínez, a report denouncing corruption by former President Jordi Pujol, then President Artur Mas, and other pro-independence figures. The report, lacking a date, seal, or signature, alleged multimillion-dollar Swiss bank accounts that were never found. In the recorded conversations, other similar operations against Catalan leaders were revealed, such as fake accounts of former Barcelona mayor Xavier Trias and extorting the owners of Andorra Bank to obtain the Pujol family’s account information. The ex-Secretary General of the PP, Dolores de Cospedal, who advocated for these police initiatives, also appears in Villarejo’s conversations, although she has not been charged by the judge despite the prosecution’s request.
The police orchestrated various operations between 2014 and 2017, without judicial approval, to discredit the political party Podemos, a major opponent of the ruling PP in Spain. These operations were exposed in ongoing investigations, from the dissemination of the infamous PISA (Pablo Iglesias S.A.) report in early 2015, dismissed by all courts (National Court, Supreme Court, and Court of Auditors), to a fake receipt planted by the police in Okdiario, alleging a deposit from the Venezuelan government into a bank account belonging to Pablo Iglesias in the tax haven of the Granadine Islands. The police even tried to convince former high-ranking Venezuelan officials to report corruption within Podemos. The recordings made by Villarejo, revealed by EL PAÍS and included in the investigative file, expose the maneuvers of the PP and the Interior Ministry to evade legal consequences in the case of the secret accounts maintained by the former treasurer of the PP, Luis Bárcenas. The audios feature conversations with Dolores de Cospedal and Francisco Martínez discussing the necessary actions to obstruct judicial inquiries related to this case, including payments from secret funds to Sergio Ríos for espionage on Bárcenas’s family.
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