“Clean everything up.” That was the mandate Leire Díez received from the PSOE or, at least, that is how she expresses it. The plot uncovered by the judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz and led by the party’s former number 3 Santos Cerdán had a coordinated plan set: to go against judges, prosecutors, and civil guards to protect the Government and the PSOE. The organization had a series of objectives marked out and the instruments they had to use for the success of their mission. First of all, it should be said that, despite the orchestration of the plan and the payment for it, successes were absent because to this day none of their objectives have been achieved, although along the way there have been dark threads.
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The objectives were clear: first, the chief prosecutor of Anti-Corruption, for pushing the mask case. At the time the plan started, only the advisor to the Minister of Transport José Luis Ábalos had been implicated. However, knowing what is known now, two years later, Cerdán could have guessed that if he did not stop the matter, it would end up splashing him. At that moment no one knew: only they knew how far his relations with Koldo García had gone.
To destroy the case, they had to go against the head of Anti-Corruption. The plot’s thesis is that if they managed to find dirty laundry on him, they might be able to blackmail him to stop the investigation. To do this, they thought of trying to use two prosecutors who for various reasons might want to participate in their plan. What they did not count on was the loyalty of both, both to Luzón and the institution and, above all, to legality.
Prosecutor José Grinda
They put 300,000 euros on the table to give information about his boss
The first was prosecutor José Grinda. In the plot’s plan — according to judicial records of the case instructed by Pedraz — the idea was to reach him through a journalist, who put on the table a manuscript offering him 300,000 euros in exchange for giving compromising information about his boss and at the same time closing several judicial cases. In Grinda’s case, the plot’s interests flowed. Some characters who participated in the operation had parallel personal interests. For example, businessman Javier Pérez Dolset sought for this prosecutor to close the case he had open against him, as did Venezuelan businessman Nervis Villalobos.
The investigation shows that, to achieve their objectives, the plan was also to try to pressure the prosecutor through blackmail and for that, a woman willing to do so was located. However, the plot did not count on Grinda immediately reporting what happened to Luzón and both going to the State Attorney General’s Office, whose top official is Álvaro García Ortiz, to denounce it. The truth is that initially, this complaint fell on deaf ears.
In parallel, Leire Díez, known as the “plumber” and who received orders from Cerdán to act, contacted prosecutor Ignacio Stampa. He had to leave Anti-Corruption after a maneuver — according to him by the former Attorney General, Dolores Delgado — to stop investigating former Police Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. The plot offered him help, a return to Anti-Corruption, and to push a lawsuit against Delgado if he gave information about Luzón. Stampa recorded that conversation and also reported it to the Madrid Prosecutor’s Office.
One of the heads of the UCO and his investigators
The plot sought, among body agents, dirty laundry on Balas
The “plumbing” of Santos Cerdán, as can be seen from Pedraz’s order, marked as its second priority target the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, which has been responsible for investigating the cases that in recent years have splashed the Government and the PSOE. The big game piece they wanted to catch — without any success — was Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Balas, head of the Economic Crime department who sealed the reports on David Sánchez, José Luis Ábalos, or Begoña Gómez. Díez verbalized in an audio the scenario they faced: “For now, what he is doing [by Balas] is turning us all into prisoners and jailers of him.” And that, precisely, is what the plot intended to reverse, also targeting Colonel Manuel Sánchez Corbí, historic head of the UCO, and the commanders who led the investigations they wanted to torpedo.
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The plot sought businessman Alejandro Hamlyn, arrested by the UCO in 2019 in an operation for fraud in fuel sales, with the -fantastical- promise to intervene in his judicial process to avoid a conviction. Hamlyn, incredulous, asked for “a little paper” that recorded the promise in writing. He, on the other hand, offered only “one thing” that would be enough for Balas to be dead: that the UCO commanders “brought containers of coke.” They also knocked on the door of Civil Guard commander Rubén Villalba, implicated in the Koldo Case, to become a kind of mole: dirty laundry on the UCO in exchange for regaining prestige in the body with a supposed “purge” that the Ministry of the Interior would carry out in the UCO leadership. In addition, they used Captain Juan Sánchez Yepes, a former UCO member, who provided details about the internal structure, operation, and commanders of his former unit to turn them into “targets of interest of the plot.” In fact, the order points out that, after his leaks, Balas becomes the priority of the sewer.
The tentacles of the plot may extend further than what has been gathered so far by the instructor. According to police sources, the UCO’s entry into the Civil Guard headquarters — a move so far unprecedented — may reveal if agents investigating the PSOE were pressured. Balas interrogated three generals to find out if the director of the Civil Guard, Mercedes González, motivated the opening of files — with unfounded suspicions from the plot — against the investigators for alleged leaks. They were put in the crosshairs for having leaked conversations of Ábalos with the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, even though it was “known for certain” that the leaker had been the former Minister of Transport.
Judge Juan Carlos Peinado
The plot, according to Pedraz, sought to destroy the procedure against Begoña Gómez
The third target was Juan Carlos Peinado, the judge investigating Begoña Gómez, wife of the President of the Government. In his case, the strategy was leaking information to the media against him, as well as complaints against him. They did something similar with Judge Beatriz Biedma, responsible for prosecuting the president’s brother, David Sánchez. Pedraz maintains that the plot sought to “destroy” the judicial procedure. Among other notes, Díez even said “we already have a strategy”; “we have been working on it for months”; “everything is perfectly coordinated.” In his case, he would have accessed a convicted judge from Badajoz and a businessman involved in a judicial process in this province to look for dirty laundry on the holder of the Court of Instruction number 4 of Badajoz. They were offered, in exchange, judicial help, which is recorded as never having arrived.
Attack the PP, save the PSOE
They offered 50,000€ to the businesswoman who claimed to carry bags with money to Ferraz
The last two targets were, on the one hand, to save the PSOE from accusations by certain businessmen about cash payments at the party’s headquarters in Ferraz, such as the commission agent Víctor de Aldama or businesswoman Carmen Pano. Pedraz states that the plot offered her 50,000 euros in exchange for changing her judicial statement and denying that she carried money to Ferraz. “She sells herself. “We must know how to buy,” Díez said to one of the implicated lawyers, Ismael Oliver.
To cover up the accusations against the party holding the Government, the plot thought it necessary to bring to light information that compromised the main opposition party, the Popular Party. As in other cases, they looked for a person who might need help, through the promise of judicial favors that never came. In his case, it was Francisco Martínez, former Secretary of State for Security with Mariano Rajoy’s Government, and accused of orchestrating the so-called ‘Operation Kitchen,’ another sewer to steal documents from the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas. When in June 2025, the Supreme Court imprisoned Santos Cerdán for leading an organization of rigged public works together with Ábalos, the plot dissolved.
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