The relationship between Plus Ultra and Julio Martínez Martínez, the friend and alleged frontman of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was very close and was further strengthened thanks to various contracts, which have led to the indictment of the former Prime Minister. On December 11, 2025, the judicial police searched Martínez’s homes. There they found 268,000 euros in cash hidden in various places such as a golf cart. They also found several contracts that have been very revealing for the investigation.
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The first of these is an agreement between the airline Plus Ultra, which was rescued by Pedro Sánchez’s government in March 2021 for 53 million euros, and Idella, one of Martínez’s companies. That contract is for “professional services provision,” dated January 19, 2021, and stipulated that Martínez would receive, when it occurred, 1% of the public bailout price of the airline.
Additionally, the police also found during the search other three contracts signed between another of Martínez’s companies, Análisis Relevante, and the company Plus Ultra. These are “advisory services” agreements dated July 2020, February 2023, and February 2025. They agree that the airline will pay 6,000 euros per month to Análisis Relevante “with the object of the contract being the delivery of a monthly report on the key aspects of the political, economic, and social situation in the world, especially what happened in Spain and Latin America.”
Zapatero would have been the author of those alleged reports, according to the accounts of Análisis Relevante, also contained in the case file overseen by the National Court judge José Luis Calama, whose content was made public yesterday. Thus, according to the 2024 accounts, Análisis Relevante had a main payer, Plus Ultra, which in that fiscal year paid 87,120 euros to Martínez’s company.
In turn, Análisis Relevante had two prototypical providers, Zapatero and Whathefav, the company of his daughters, Laura and Alba Rodríguez Espinosa. The former president received 95,000 euros from the company in 2024 and his daughters’ company, another 43,560 euros. In total, between 2020 and 2025, Zapatero earned 490,780 euros from Análisis Relevante and his daughters, 236,125 euros.
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Zapatero’s task consisted of making reports on the key aspects of the political, economic, and social situation in the world, especially what happened in Spain and Latin America,” as the former president himself acknowledged during his appearance in the Senate. Whathefav, for its part, carried out “agency services” such as formatting the reports and sending them to clients. Something the investigators consider “generic and imprecise.”
But beyond the imprecision, the problem for the investigated lies in the absence and inconsistency of those reports. In the bulk of the case file that has been shared with the parties, there is no record of those politically contented reports. According to what has emerged through some information, the geopolitical studies found by the police would be works of barely a couple of pages and very vague.
Zapatero responded to those suspicions during his appearance in the Senate where he assured that he made “many oral reports,” some for Martínez Martínez and others “for other people” whose names he did not want to reveal.
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