Leire Díez was appointed in April 2024, by order of the then PSOE organization secretary, Santos Cerdán, to initiate a series of actions to save the PSOE and Pedro Sánchez’s circle from the judicial cases that were hounding them and to dig up dirt on their political rivals. Now, the Audiencia Nacional has uncovered these escapades and found a large amount of audio material because Díez recorded these clandestine meetings, where she offered deals with the Prosecutor’s Office and claimed to be the emissary of the PSOE and the Government to “put themselves on the right side of history.”
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Now all these audios have been seized by the Civil Guard’s central operational unit (UCO), which has used them to unravel what this plot consisted of, who formed it, and whom they accessed. One of the latter was Francisco Martínez. He was the number two at the Ministry of Interior under Jorge Fernández Díaz, in Mariano Rajoy’s government. He is accused, along with his former boss, of setting up a parapolice operation against the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas.
Martínez had problems, and still has, with justice, and Díez offered him help, specifically a deal with the Prosecutor’s Office, in exchange for talking about certain issues, specifically about how Operation Catalonia was conceived and to find out if there was any irregular operation in the intervention of Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA), owned by the Cierco brothers.
Díez also showed interest in data about the Anti-Corruption prosecutor José Grinda (of whom she said: “I’m already taking care of him”), who had an open case against another member of this plot, the businessman Javier Pérez Dolset; and about the EREs of Andalusia – coincidentally, Díez was collecting money from one of the responsible parties, the former minister Gaspar Zarrías.
Díez and Martínez met several times, all of them recorded without the knowledge of the former Secretary of State for Security, in the office of the lawyer of the former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos, who also asked for discretion and even to put phones in airplane mode. It did them little good.
Leire Díez began her presentation by saying that she was an envoy from the PSOE and the Government: “I have the best interlocutors,” she told Martínez, who was initially reluctant to this meeting, held in 2024. The reason is that shortly before he had already had similar meetings with other emissaries, in this case Pérez Dolset himself and the lawyer Gonzalo Boye, who had promised him that an amendment would be introduced into the Amnesty Law so that he would not be judged in exchange for providing information about what was done in the Rajoy Government against Catalan independence.
“They even showed me WhatsApp messages from Bolaños (Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños) and Miriam Nogueras (Junts) talking about the matter,” the former popular politician warned the former socialist militant. In the end, the agreements did not materialize because on the day the amnesty was presented, the amendment was not submitted.
When Díez approached him, she was aware of all those meetings. What she offered him was a deal with the Prosecutor’s Office to close his case as soon as possible. But in return, she wanted information and for him to acknowledge Operation Catalonia if he was called to testify before the investigation committee.
Martínez began to speak. 49.40 “The name of Operation Catalonia is not used. Do you think Rajoy had that planning capacity? That as such did not exist. There were actions in the police sphere aimed at bringing to light corruption cases of relevant people for the independence movement with a certain prospective search for information,” acknowledged the former number two of the Interior, who is currently sitting in the dock for the Kitchen case in the Audiencia Nacional.
“Was the machine forced to search for information on the Pujols? Yes. Was a good part of the information true? Also,” the former popular leader snapped at Leire Díez. She asked him if the Interior Ministry paid Victoria Álvarez, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s ex-girlfriend, to provide information. “Yes. Even Fernando Marlaska (current Minister of the Interior) paid her for a few months while being minister,” he stressed.
Martínez acknowledged to Díez that although he did not fully trust former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo – convicted and awaiting several judicial processes – he did not know until years later that many of his intelligence notes were false, such as those he provided about an operation by the Rajoy government against the BPA. “Villarejo was not in the investigation of the BPA. He made reports afterwards to charge the Ciercos. He does nothing for free. The intelligence notes are lies,” he assured her in that conversation.
Cerdán’s envoy told the former number two of the Interior that one of her missions was to expose Villarejo and prevent him from becoming a “hero,” while in parallel she was meeting with the former commissioner and his lawyer, offering him deals with the Prosecutor’s Office in exchange for information about Rajoy, the PP, Podemos, and Operation Catalonia, among others.
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