The Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) of the Police attributes to the daughters of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Laura and Alba, a significant role in the issuance of false invoices that would have served to cover up payments linked to an alleged influence peddling scheme in the environment of the former prime minister. In its report, the Police maintain that the activity of the company of Zapatero’s daughters, Whathefav, would have allowed “generating adhoc billing intended to provide formal coverage for certain financial or commercial movements” through fake reports.
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In that scheme, according to the police account, the business contacts would have been provided by Zapatero himself, the consulting reports would have been prepared by the partner of the consultancy, Sergio Sánchez, and the company of the former president’s daughters would have been limited to their layout and subsequent distribution to clients. A function that the agents consider lacking “special technical value” and interpret as part of a structure aimed at the “channeling of payments.”
The Police attribute to the company the “channeling of payments” from clients and from the network itself
Once the emails and the evidence gathered were analyzed, the UDEF concludes that the commercial relationship, combined with the personal ties between the participants, “is not limited to sporadic contacts,” but rather evidences an “operational coordination” that reinforces the hypothesis that Whathefav is “one more element of the investigated network.”
Based on this operational model, the investigators maintain that the company of the former prime minister’s daughters would be positioned as a “finalist element” within the investigated network and as a “distribution center of economic flows,” responsible for redistributing funds coming both from clients and from companies within the investigated circuit itself.
In that context appears one of the points that has gained the most relevance in the investigation. The relationship of the former socialist leader himself with the accounts linked to the company is total, as he is “listed as authorized” on the bank accounts of Laura and Alba Rodríguez Espinosa where amounts transferred by Whathefav were deposited.
The importance of this fact, the investigators emphasize, does not lie solely in the existence of bank authorization, but in the context of the recurrence of an economic flow in which the company would have acted as an intermediary between different companies of the network for an amount exceeding one million euros.
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Within the framework of the investigation, the judge has ordered the blocking of more than twenty bank accounts. Among them several in the name of the former president and his wife, María Sonsoles Espinosa, whom the accusations demand to be included in the list of charges.
The popular accusation exercised by Hazte Oír has based its request on a UDEF report that also includes a reference to the patrimonial situation of the couple.
That document refers to the mortgage of Zapatero and his wife, noting that on February 26, 2024, they acquired a property for 580,000 euros, for which Banco Santander granted them a mortgage loan of 500,000 euros. According to that same report, the operation would have been canceled the following year, on January 16, 2025, through a transfer ordered by the former president’s wife herself.
The report, which does not go into detail about the mentioned mortgage loan, also notes that one of the accounts shared by the couple would have received transfers from third parties who are under suspicion.
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