A matter of nuances. The operational deputy director of the Civil Guard, Manuel Llamas, that is, the highest uniformed official of the corps, has admitted to the judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz that he asked the UCO not to be “proactive” in judicial cases although he denies telling his bosses to take a back seat.
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Llamas was summoned today to testify as a suspect within the plot being investigated involving Leire Díez, known as the PSOE plumber, to try to torpedo judicial cases affecting the party or people close to the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez. In his statement, he justified that order on the need for agents not to invade the powers of the judicial investigating body, according to sources present at the interrogation.
Pedraz, together with the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, suspects that Díez accessed the director general of the Civil Guard, Mercedes González, whom she knew previously, to act disciplinarily against the agents in charge of these investigations to try to stop them. She would have used Llamas to open several internal disciplinary proceedings.
The head of the Civil Guard denies this although he does acknowledge that up to three confidential reports were opened, although he frames them within normality, according to sources present at the interrogation.
During the Anti-Corruption prosecutor’s interrogation of Llamas as a suspect, the questions focused mainly on one of these confidential reports, opened after a UCO report regarding David Sánchez, brother of the Prime Minister, included the email address of Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez.
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This fact caused both Mercedes González – who will testify tomorrow as a suspect – and the Interior Minister himself, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, to call Llamas alerting him that Gómez was receiving huge amounts of messages following the publication of her address. However, the suspect has encompassed it within the normality of relations due to the events that occurred.
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According to Llamas, after those conversations he demanded a detailed report from Alfonso López Malo, former head of the UCO. Not being satisfied with the explanations, he decided to open a confidential report that ended with a proposal for a reprimand.
The DAO, who has refused to resign despite his indictment, has also nuanced what several UCO agents declared that they were required to issue the report on David Sánchez as soon as possible and were forbidden from taking their vacations for it. His argument is that it was decided to reorganize vacations to guarantee service continuity.
The agents who had testified, however, said they were forced to postpone their vacations to urgently finish a report. Those commanders also maintained that the then director general of the Civil Guard Leonardo Marcos intended the report to conclude that no relevant facts for the criminal case had been found.
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