The current Secretary General of Podemos and Minister for Social Rights, Ione Belarra, together with former party leader Pablo Iglesias, in an act in October 2021. Chema Moya (EFE)
Podemos launched a counterattack this Monday. After learning that the Criminal Court of the National Court had ordered Coroner Manuel García-Castellón to open the investigation into the alleged irregular funding of the party, based on the testimony of Hugo Armando Carvajal, Pollo Carvajal, head of Venezuela’s counterintelligence until 2014, resumed — the spokesman for education in Congress, Pablo Echenique, has accused the judge of conducting a “judicial hunt”. A few words to follow, in recent months the Neurona case has also been dumped and the Dina case has been considered closed after no evidence was found against Pablo Iglesias, the formation’s former general secretary.
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The Left Party, currently led by Ione Belarra, is hitting a thesis that it has been repeating for years: the existence of a hate “campaign” against its members, which includes the police and the judiciary. It is what the formation calls lawfare or “legal warfare”: “Lawfare is the new coup d’etat. It’s a set of devices where media powers linked to economic powers join forces with judicial authorities to unlawfully win in court what they failed to win in the elections,” Iglesias said in an act with the former last year Lula da Silva President of Brazil who was imprisoned for sentences that were eventually overturned.
This Monday, García-Castellón agreed to launch an investigation into the alleged irregular funding of the political force and ordered the halt to all investigations he had commissioned the police to do. The judge, who reopened this investigation in October 2021 after five years of closure, was forced to make this decision after receiving the order from the court’s criminal division itself, which upheld an appeal from prosecutors when he faced this order asked. according to legal sources.
The judge reinstated the case after taking testimony from Pollo Carvajal, who was arrested last September and involved in an extradition process to the United States. The military officer credited previous defendants in the formation with collecting payments from Chavist governments and pointed out to Juan Carlos Monedero, founder of Podemos; former MP Carolina Bescansa and sociologists Jorge Lago and Ariel Jerez. To investigate, the judge included this testimony in a summary shelved by instructor Alejandro Abascal in 2016 after receiving a complaint against the party based on “a disorderly series of reproductions of news published in the press.” supported by an alleged police report, dubbed the Pisa Report (acronym for Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima), which did not bear the stamp of any Corps unit.
This Pisa report was approved by the Ministry of the Interior in the phase of Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP), when the so-called patriotic police operated, and served as a basis for the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) to take the case to the Court of Auditors, which considered this irrelevant.
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The attacks on the judge
The decisions of García-Castellón, who also led the Dina case, have put him in the sights of Podemos. “A judge friend of mine told me that it’s obvious that the García-Castellón thing is subterfuge. He also told me that they will never judge him,” says Pablo Iglesias in his memoir Face the Truth, referring to the investigation that began in 2015 into the theft of the cell phone of one of his advisers, Dina Bousselham, the contents of which were found was copied in the house of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and eventually also published in various media.
The judge of the National Court opened an investigation in 2019 to find out whether Villarejo had committed a crime of divulging secrets by leaking that information to journalists, or even if he was behind an alleged cellphone theft operation. But the judge reversed that thesis in 2020, finding Iglesias deceived him into portraying himself as a victim. García-Castellón then submitted his charges to the Supreme Court, which rejected them for lack of evidence before returning the case, which he eventually closed in January this year after finding no evidence against the former leader of Podemos.
“Who turned an investigation into Podemos’ espionage into a failed attempt to impeach me when I became vice president?” Iglesias returned to the indictment this June. A series of allegations that have led the Madrid Public Prosecutor’s Office to open a case to investigate whether the former politician committed a crime of defamation and defamation against Judge García-Castellón. Although Monedero insisted on the same Monday, after knowing the file of the case of alleged irregular funding: “The Spanish judiciary is very circumspect and just before the European authorities can open a procedure for subterfuge and Spain loses points assessment of their democracy order a stop. If the CGPJ [Consejo General del Poder Judicial] worked… ‘It’s called democracy,’ we chanted.’
Podemos also includes in his theory on the administration of justice the final prison sentences against his spokeswoman Isabel Serra and former deputy Alberto Rodríguez, who assaulted police officers. And the Neurona case, a case in which the party remains charged as a legal entity and which opened in the summer of 2020 to investigate whether the formation hired Mexican consultant Neurona for the April 2019 general election and paid him more than 360,000 euros has some projects that never got done. In those investigations, which prosecutors have drained, seven lines of investigation have been opened, six of which have been shelved – in addition to three other derivative investigations, such as the Nañera case, two of which have already been greenlit and archived. The trainer ruled out, for example, the alleged bonuses to party officials, the diversion of money from the solidarity fund or the irregularities in the reform of the Podemos headquarters.
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