After months of paralysis, the Neurona case begins to attract attention with the final report commissioned by the investigating judge Juan José Escalonilla (a document that concludes that Podemos acted in hiring the Mexican consulting firm Neurona for the general April 2019 adjusted to market prices). Choose). One of the defendants has asked the judge to release the last surviving part of this investigation, which was launched more than three years ago and which, after becoming a macro case with a dozen lines of inquiry, was gradually emptied until it focused exclusively on focused on definitively archiving the relationship between Latin American economy and political education.
In a letter addressed to the judge this Monday, the lawyer of Juan Manuel del Olmo, head of the 2019 election campaign, demands that the summary be closed immediately “once it has been confirmed” that the party has “adjusted” the average prices paid in the sector . In this document, to which EL PAÍS had access, the defense emphasizes that despite the “false” and “twisted” accusations against the training, the instructor’s “extensive investigation” revealed that Neurona’s employment was legal. .
These words of defense are not trivial. The Neurona investigation went through several phases. Initially, Escalonilla suspected that Podemos, which he was suing as a legal entity, had paid the consulting firm up to 363,000 euros for work it never performed. But later, after making sure they had been dealt with, he directed his investigation to see whether the amount paid had been excessive. To investigate this theory in more detail, he spent 15 months looking for a technician who could determine the costs. The result is a report by Aleix Sanmartín, doctor of political communication at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), shared with the parties last week. A document that destroys this hypothesis.
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The dossier presented by the expert concludes that the work developed by Neurona for Podemos not only “complies with the canons and professional standards in the field of international political communication and campaign design”. However, beyond that, the amount paid is “in the middle range and even slightly below what is determined by market prices in the sector.”
The inclusion of this report in the case has now provoked the movement of Del Olmo’s lawyer, who reminds the judge that he would decide on the procedural file upon receipt of this technical report. According to the defense, we cannot wait any longer to order dismissal because the case has caused “significant” damage to the reputation of the party and the defendant. “May [ha sido] was portrayed in the media for almost four years (the entire last legislative period in which he was even in government) as being responsible for numerous frauds that in reality did not exist, but which one after another filled the front pages of newspapers and opened news programs on radio and television , “The defense emphasizes and adds that there were people who were “unjustly and publicly stigmatized by their allegations.” A “future” filing of the lawsuit “fairly does not constitute sufficient redress,” the letter from Del Olmo’s attorney emphasizes.
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Escalonilla initiated the Neurona case in the summer of 2020 after receiving a complaint from a former Podemos lawyer: José Manuel Calvente, confronted with the leadership, as Del Olmo’s defense reminds in its letter now addressed to the judge, the former lawyer accused of confiscating internal training documentation to later use it in an “illegitimate” way.
According to the statement of the party’s former lawyer, the judge opened up to ten investigations, nine of which have already been filed. Among other things, he excluded the payment of bonuses to the manager and treasurer of Podemos; that the cost of work at headquarters was excessive; or that money was diverted from the Training Solidarity Fund, a fund to which civil servants donate part of their salary for social purposes, and that the right was classified as Fund b. The nanny case was also archived, a derivation that focused on the alleged use of Podemos employees to care for the daughter of former Equality Minister Irene Montero and former government vice president and former party leader Pablo Iglesias. Currently only the part about the relationship of Podemos with Neurona for the 2019 general elections is alive, which was waiting for the expert report from Sanmartín.
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