He office case which was founded by the former Minister of Finance Christopher Montoro it keeps stuck for five years disagreements between the judge and the prosecutorbut also between one’s own Carmen García Cerdan and his Head of Anti-Corruption, Alejandro Luzón. These clashes have had an impact on the work of investigators from the Mossos d’Esquadra and the Civil Guard, who have been forced to stop their investigations.
The first of these clashes occurred after the head of the Court of Instruction number 2 of Tarragona ordered the General Criminal Investigation Commission of the Mossos d’Esquadra Yet the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to intervene in the conversations of four investigated people with the communications control systems called Siltec and Golf Reliant-12, respectively.
However, the Anticorruption prosecutor handling the case, Carmen García Cerdá, filed an appeal in which she asked the Provincial Court of Tarragona to annul the decision of the judge of tap the phones of the suspects.
Fundamental rights
The person responsible for fiscal Ministery considered that the instructor had not “correctly evaluated the different indications” discovered by the agents, so that “the adoption of a measure so interfering with fundamental rights” as the recording of the calls was not justified, therefore He asked that the order be revoked and made void.
The Tarragona Court ended up agreeing with the prosecutor, considering that the judge’s decision was based on an anonymous complaint, which is why it prevented the suspects from being recorded by the Judicial Police.
A few months later, the prosecutor again faced another decision from the instructor, that on June 5, 2022 had refused to lift the secrecy of the proceedings. García Cerdá based his request on the fact that those investigated did not know about the investigations to which they were being subjected, which had been opened in 2018, as they were secret.
“Extreme complexity”
In this case, the Court of Tarragona maintained the judge’s decision to maintain secrecy because “it is a case of extreme complexity” and because if it were known “it could clearly be put in danger: the Chamber has not the slightest doubt of that the claim of the Prosecutor’s Office would seriously compromise the result of the ongoing investigation,” says a car from December 2022which defines the judge’s work as “careful, complex and methodical.”
The third of the clashes that have occurred in the case, and the one that has slowed down the investigations the most, took place within the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office itself. Carmen García Cerdá, who had in her possession Treasury emails that pointed to a crime of revealing secrets, since as sources of the case explain to this editorial staff, senior officials of the Ministry would have provided confidential documentation, he intended to claim the documents attached to the ’emails’ included in the case. However, his boss in Anti-Corruption did not consider it necessary.
That is why García Cerdá resorted to article 27 of the Tax Statute, with the intention of showing his disagreement with the orders received from his boss, who was not in favor of carrying out more procedures in relation to the documents attached to the emails that had appeared in the case. .
Board of prosecutors
At the Board of Prosecutors on September 26 in which the matter was submitted, Luzón obtained the support of 19 colleagues, while only five opted for García Cerdá, which means that the procedures that she considered necessary for the investigation to advance were not will be carried out.
This situation has in fact paralyzed the investigations carried out by the Mossos and the UCO of the Civil Guard, bodies that, due to the impossibility of advancing further, ended them almost a year ago, according to the sources consulted.
The Investigative Court number 2 of Tarragona, of which Judge Rubén Rus Vela is now the head, opened this procedure on August 2, 2018, which has remained secret since then. In December 2021, the instructor agreed to investigate four people. Three of them are the executive president of Equipo Economico and former chief of staff of Montoro in the Ministry of Finance, Ricardo Martínez Rico; and the managing partners of the firm Manuel de Vicente-Tutor and Salvador Ruiz Galludwho directed the Tax Agency between 2001 and 2004. It has not emerged who the fourth person investigated is.
“Covert commissions”
The instructor investigates whether these members of the Economic Team (EE), the firm founded in 2006 by the former PP minister, used their “influences” for the benefit of their clients. between “senior officials and officials of the Ministry of Finance”, as specified in an order from the Provincial Court of Tarragona, the content of which was advanced by this editorial team. On some of the dates investigated, Montoro himself was the Minister of Finance.
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The judicial resolution, which is based on the content of the police reports, states that it would be “a plot whose purpose would be none other than to intervene and decisively influence favorable legislative reforms for gas companies included in the Association of Industrial and Medicinal Gas Manufacturers (AGGIM)”.
And to obtain these “influences”, they would have hired the services of the business Equipo Economía, from which Montoro claims to have been separated since 2008. The police offices add that the amounts obtained by said services, “due to their amount and legal void”, could be “the covert commissions for the achievement of the intended legislative reforms”, highlights the January 2022 order revealed by this editorial team.