The PSOE has reactivated judicial activity by submitting to the judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz, in charge of the ‘Leire case’, a document in which it requests that the bank data to be provided about 12 accounts linked to the party be visible only to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, as it may affect people who are not under investigation.
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In a document, the party requests that the public ministry be responsible for carrying out the purge of the documentation to prevent banking information of people unrelated to the investigation from reaching the parties.
The representative of the socialist party indicates that a claim for bank movements has been made “in a generic way and not specified in relation to the investigated persons nor the amounts paid to them.” This contains, he says, “a multitude of movements, affecting numerous people and entities not linked to the facts that are the subject of these proceedings, and whose privacy must be safeguarded.”
Therefore, he considers that “precautions must be heightened” so that no “leak” to the public opinion occurs regarding data not linked to the present investigation.
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At the end of July, Pedraz agreed, at the request of the UCO, to analyze more PSOE accounts in search of payments, so far undetected, to the party’s so-called ‘plumber’, Leire Díez, investigated within a plot that sought to destabilize judicial processes affecting the party and the Government.
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The judge accepted expanding the analysis of certain accounts. Specifically, six belong to the PSOE, although he requests the banks to identify more accounts than those held by the party. The magistrate’s order is that all information be sent to the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard for analysis and be deposited in a separate “economic” file to prevent leaks. Afterwards, data not necessary for the case will be purged. What the PSOE now requests is that it first pass through the hands of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
The agents suspect that there may be other accounts through which payments have been made and that are not currently in the registry. For this reason, and to be able to map the whole “banking operation,” the UCO asked Pedraz to expand the investigation.
The PSOE maintains that any movements that may have been made from the party’s accounts would in any case have been behind the party’s back. Investigators suspect that a series of payments were made from the socialist accounts that would be intermediaries to end up in Díez’s pockets in exchange for carrying out an operation against those investigating cases linked to the environment of the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, or the party itself.
According to the document, the accounts “apparently,” and always taking into account the presumption of innocence of the investigated, “could have been used illegitimately to make payments or cover expenses not linked to the activity of my client (PSOE), nor to its statutory purposes nor programmatic principles, outside the organization.”
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