The organization led by Santos Cerdán orchestrated to destroy judicial cases had a dual approach. On one hand, to look for dirt on investigators of matters affecting the PSOE or the environment of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. And on the other, as a counterattack, to look for scandals or irregularities of their political rivals, especially the Popular Party.
The president of the PNV’s EBB, Aitor Esteban, stated this Thursday that he is convinced that the state legislature “has come to an end” and addressed the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to assure him that “the general interest demands elections this year.” Furthermore, he reiterated that his party does not contemplate a motion of no confidence and asked the head of the Executive for reflection because “many things have happened this week,” but “more will happen.”
Alberto Núñez Feijóo insisted this Thursday on calling for elections due to the corruption cases surrounding the Government and Pedro Sánchez’s PSOE, but he also warned that he will do “everything possible” to change the Government: “When I say everything, I mean everything.” Feijóo, in any case, avoided explicitly mentioning the motion of no confidence as a tool to change the Government, although he again appealed for the partners to take action.
Once the summary of the Plus Ultra case is known, the investigated parties already know what evidence and indications exist against them. Messages, invoices, documents, conversations, or tax information that are part of the case and have led Judge José Luis Calama to affirm, based on indications, the existence of a network of influence peddling led by former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Now the moves begin. The investigated parties have three options: deny all the indications, band together among themselves, or adopt a ‘every man for himself’ approach.
The first session of the trial against David Sánchez, brother of the Prime Minister, took place this morning at a slow pace. Sánchez arrived at the Audiencia de Badajoz, where he is being tried for alleged crimes of influence peddling and malfeasance, at 9:40 in the morning. He got out of the car, put on his blazer, and entered the Palace of Justice calmly.
Blow after blow, almost without respite, the Government and the PSOE watch with bewilderment and astonishment, with alarm and concern, the flood of judicial cases pressuring Pedro Sánchez. This Thursday, with the president’s brother, David Sánchez, sitting in the dock at the Badajoz Court, after agents from the Civil Guard’s central operative unit (UCO) again raided the Ferraz headquarters on Wednesday to gather data on the plot allegedly orchestrated by the former organization secretary, Santos Cerdán, following the indictment of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the pending sentence for former minister José Luis Ábalos, or the ongoing process against the wife of the head of government, Begoña Gómez.
It is now the turn of former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz to give his explanations about his role in the so-called ‘Operation Kitchen’, a parapolice operation to steal documents about the PP’s slush fund from the party’s former treasurer Luis Bárcenas, who threatened to hand them over to the judge in the Gürtel case.
The court judging the Kitchen case, the alleged parapolice operation to spy on the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas between 2013 and 2015, finished yesterday hearing the recordings submitted as evidence in the case and today will begin to listen to the ten accused, including former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz and former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez. The Prosecutor’s Office is requesting 15 years in prison for both.
The group that was formed in April 2024 to disrupt judicial processes – and those who led them – with little success consisted of nine people, although not all with the same role. There may be more, but now, Judge Santiago Pedraz limits it to them, assigning them the roles of leader, his second-in-command, financiers, and executors. All of them have been caught, as always happens, by new facts that have appeared in another case. Now they will have to provide explanations. Who are they, what connects them, what drives them?
When her husband died two years ago, Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) began writing Ghost Stories (Seix Barral/Edicions 62), a book that helped her face the abyss of “vanished time,” start the grieving process, and adjust to life alone after 43 years of marriage. If the one who left, a victim of cancer that the author describes with harshness but without losing her sense of humor, had not been Paul Auster, it would be the same, she admits, because this work is not a biography of the novelist, but a lost love song. “The most painful reality in this world is not loving someone and losing them to death, but the inability to love,” she argues.
