The Court blocks the investigation into the two main dirty war plots against Podemos | Spain

Judge Santiago Pedraz has refused to delve deeper into the investigation into the police espionage of Podemos ordered by the Ministry of the Interior in 2016, the objective of which was to discredit the leaders of that political formation by leaking false information to certain media, according to the numerous evidence that already appears in the summary opened for this case.

The investigation opened months ago into these events managed to uncover the existence within the ministry of two secret operations against Podemos leaders, called Venus and Bolívar, which were leaked to media related to the PP Government with attributions of crimes that turned out to be false. .

When Podemos requested that we delve deeper into these two police plots by collecting documentation of the secret operations, Judge Pedraz refused, with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office, to request from the Ministry of the Interior all the files and information related to both actions, perpetrated without any support or judicial knowledge. Their argument was that these two operations were not related to the investigation opened by the consultation in police databases of events attributable to the 69 deputies that Podemos obtained in the elections that year. Podemos appealed this decision last Tuesday, December 17, understanding that the complaint presented at the time and which led to the opening of the investigation denounced the two secret operations now uncovered. Through its reform appeal, Podemos has demanded “the complete files of the Venus and Bolívar operations.”

Operation Venus: an apocryphal report to discredit Pablo Iglesias. On January 12, 2016, OKDiario published an alleged confidential report from the National Police with this headline: “The Police discover that the Iranian dictatorship has given 2 million euros to Iglesias and his entourage since 2013.” Three weeks later, Eugenio Pino, deputy operational director of the Police, number three in the Ministry of the Interior, ordered an investigation into the veracity of that report. The chief inspector of the coordination section of the Central Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UCDEF) reported that on February 1, 2016, a letter was received from the deputy operational directorate with a report called PISA (Pablo Iglesias SA) where it was reported that a series of companies made money transfers from tax havens to a Spanish company related to a television program presented by Pablo Iglesias. “Due to the fact that during the development of the investigation, people with possible public or economic relevance could be affected and considering the importance of the consequences that could arise from it, the convenience of the investigation being declared secret is considered necessary,” the proposal proposed. Central Money Laundering and Anti-Corruption Investigation Unit.

The inspector explains that at first only the businessmen of the firm linked to Iglesias’ television program were included among the people investigated and not the leader of Podemos. But one of the police officers who was entrusted with the job “checked the PEOPLE application [base de datos policial] the surnames ‘Iglesias Turrión’ to obtain information about one of the people who appeared in the PISA report.” The inspector, “given the sensitivity of the people investigated,” because Iglesias was an elected deputy at the time, “decided that only she would proceed to consult their databases and continued with the investigation individually.” The chief commissioner of the UDEF presented a complaint to the Court of Auditors on February 9, 2016 for alleged illegal financing of Podemos when the secret police investigation had just begun. The police officers in charge of the work decided in December 2016, ten months after starting their investigations, “to make the investigation passive as they did not find sufficient evidence of a crime.” Podemos understands that the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior tried to give “the appearance of legality to the PISA report that was not even signed by any police official by transferring it to the UDEF to carry out an investigation based on an apocryphal document.”

Operation Bolívar: a Venezuelan confidant so that “the Podemos people do not reach” the Government. The deputy operational directorate headed by Commissioner Eugenio Pino told UCDEF that a former member of Hugo Chávez’s Venezuelan government wanted to declare that Pablo Iglesias, Juan Carlos Monedero and Jorge Verstrynge had received large amounts of money from Venezuela for political advice as members of the Center for Political and Social Studies Foundation (CEPS) and that they supposedly did not declare those income to the Spanish public treasury. After visiting confidant Rafael Isea, former Venezuelan minister, in New York on April 12, 2016, the UCDEF asked the Central Criminal Intelligence Unit two days later to open a secret investigation given that the people investigated had public and political relevance. The investigation, called Bolívar, continued its course, but the newspaper Abc published, before it was concluded and when it was still secret, the results of the operation: “A Chaves minister says that CEPS collected more funds from Venezuela and did not pay the Treasury.” On July 19, investigators closed the case: “The implementation of efforts to verify the veracity of such information and eventually determine possible criminal responsibilities of the aforementioned persons have been unsuccessful.” Podemos recalls in the appeal presented for these events to be investigated in depth that during the meeting with the confidant, police officer Fuentes Gago asked Isea for information with the following argument: “If it helps us prevent Podemos from arriving [al Gobierno]shit in the sea, better for everyone.”

The fake account of the Grenadine Islands. With the Bolívar investigation open, Commissioner Eugenio Pino, deputy operational director, returned to deliver documentation to the UCDEF in mid-April 2016 that “implied that in February 2014, the Popular Power Minister of Economy of the Government of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, had ordered the transfer of 272,325 US dollars to a bank account titled by Pablo Iglesias in the EURO PACIFIC BANK entity in San Vicente and the Grenadines.” The police tried to confirm this documentation while it was published in OKDiario on May 6, 2016: “The Maduro Government paid $272,000 to Pablo Iglesias in the Grenadines tax haven in 2014.” On July 19, the police officers from Operation Bolívar who investigated this case wrote: “The information provided by the complainant and the documentation provided in the manner described do not have sufficient substance to motivate the transfer to judicial headquarters, so it is proposed to abandon this line of research. We can now remember that the Ministry of the Interior granted an “extraordinary residence permit” to the Venezuelan citizen “who submitted the false documentation” against Pablo Iglesias.