The letter sent by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to the citizens, with which he initiated a period of reflection after learning that his wife, Begoña Gómez, had been charged, was the starting point of the PSOE plumber Leire Díaz’s plot to begin her activity to try to stop or torpedo judicial processes affecting the party or the Executive.
This is stated in the order of the instructor of the National Court Santiago Pedraz, which La Vanguardia has accessed, and which holds that after the charge against Begoña Gómez, the former general secretary of the PSOE Santos Cerdán summoned Leire Díez to Ferraz. That meeting was the starting point for the plot’s activity. “Santos sent me to go. We have information that can help the president,” Díez says in a conversation now in possession of the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard.
In that meeting, according to the order, besides Cerdán and Díez, businessman Javier Pérez Dolset and Sánchez’s former Chief of Staff, Juan Manuel Serrano, would have participated. The first of them is also charged. Also other members of the PSOE’s organic structure in that April 2024, such as the communications director, Ion Antolín.
There, as Pedraz points out, they begin to develop “a series of actions” whose aim was “the destabilization” of the judicial cases affecting the PSOE or the Government, “presenting as the ultimate goal to protect the interests at stake” in the procedures.
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Pedraz records in the order a conversation between Pérez Dolset, Díez, and prosecutor Ignacio Stampa, in which the first states that “when the charge against Begoña Gómez comes out (…) the president [referring to Sánchez] already said, that everything should be cleaned up.” To which Díez adds, clarifying; “clean it up.” Pérez Dolset finishes: “Clean it up, without limits.” In the same vein, a handwritten note by the plumber herself has been found, in which she writes: “We tried to contact the PSOE for two years and only when Begoña’s case happened did someone receive us.”
For the execution of this plan, according to the proceedings, the offer of “remunerations or favors” to Civil Guard officials, those investigated, and prosecutors in exchange for “information or acts contrary” to the exercise of their duties would have been included. According to the order, it was established as a “premise to attack the proper direction of the investigations.” Pedraz cites at this point Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who has been instructing the case against Begoña Gómez, Pedro Sánchez’s wife, for more than two years.
For this, the PSOE plumber had the “impulse” and “intellectual and financial support” of Santos Cerdán, who would have agreed to pay her for such services 4,000 euros a month “charged to the party’s funds.” The order indicates that Cerdán, as then number two of the PSOE, would have put “the party’s structure” at the disposal “of the criminal structure”: allowing them to use his staff for the development of administrative functions, providing premises for meetings, or bearing the cost of logistics, such as travel or vehicle rentals.
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