After months of paralysis, the Neuron case begins to agitate after the final expert report commissioned by the investigating judge Juan José Escalonilla has been incorporated (a document that concludes that Podemos adjusted to market prices when hiring the Mexican consulting firm Neurona for the general elections of April 2019 ). One of the accused has asked the magistrate to definitively archive the last remaining part of these investigations, opened more than three years ago and which, after becoming a macro-case with a dozen lines of investigation, have gradually deflated until focus exclusively on the relationship between Latin American business and political formation.
In a letter sent to the judge this Monday, the lawyer of Juan Manuel del Olmo, head of the 2019 electoral campaign, demands that the summary be immediately closed, “once it has been confirmed” that the party “adjusted” at the average prices paid in the sector. In this document, to which EL PAÍS has had access, the defense insists that, despite the “spurious” and “twisted” accusations leveled against the training, the “exhaustive investigation” of the instructor has shown that the hiring of Neurona was legal .
These words of the defense are not trivial. The investigations into Neurona have gone through several phases. At first, Escalonilla suspected that Podemos, which she accused as a legal entity, had paid the consulting firm up to 363,000 euros for work that she never provided. But later, after verifying that they were done, she changed her investigation to investigate whether the amount paid had been inflated. In fact, to try to delve into that thesis, she searched for 15 months for a technician who would assess the cost. And the result has been a report prepared by Aleix Sanmartín, doctor in Political Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), which was notified to the parties last week. A document that destroys that hypothesis.
The dossier provided by the expert concludes that the work developed by Neurona for Podemos not only “complies with the canons and professional standards in the field of international political communication and campaign design.” But, in addition, the amount that was paid “is within the average range, and even slightly below, of what is established by the market prices of the sector.”
The incorporation of this report to the case has now provoked the movement of Del Olmo’s lawyer, who reminds the judge who said that he would rule on the file of the process when he received this technical report. In the opinion of the defense, we cannot wait any longer to order the dismissal, since the case has caused “serious” damage to the reputation of the party and the accused. “Can [ha sido] pointed out in the media for almost four years (the entire last legislature, in which he even had government responsibilities) as responsible for numerous frauds that really did not exist, but which have filled successive newspaper front pages and opened newscasts on radio and television,” the defense emphasizes, which adds that there have been people who “have been unfairly and publicly stigmatized by their accusation.” A “future” filing of the case “does not, in fairness, represent sufficient reparation,” emphasizes the letter from Del Olmo’s lawyer.
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Escalonilla launched the Neuron case in the summer of 2020 after receiving a complaint from a former Podemos lawyer: José Manuel Calvente, confronted with the leadership, as Del Olmo’s defense recalls in its letter now sent to the judge, which accuses the former lawyer of seizing internal documentation from training to later use it in an “illegitimate” way.
After the statement of the party’s former lawyer, the magistrate opened up to 10 lines of investigation, of which nine have already been filed. Among others, he ruled out paying bonuses to the manager and treasurer of Podemos; that the costs of the headquarters work were inflated; or that money was diverted from the training’s solidarity fund, a fund to which officials donate part of their salary for social purposes and that the right classified as fund b. Also archived was the Nanny case, a derivative that focused on the alleged use of Podemos workers to care for the daughter of the former Minister of Equality, Irene Montero, and the former vice president of the Government and former leader of the party, Pablo Iglesias. Currently, only the part on Podemos’s relationship with Neurona for the 2019 general elections remains alive, which was awaiting Sanmartín’s expert report.
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