The Police inspector who traveled to New York to gather information from a former minister of Chávez against Podemos and who investigated the parapolice dossier PISA (Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima) has confessed to the National Court that she entered restricted databases to investigate the activity of the then leader of Podemos, the third party with the highest representation at the time in the Spanish Parliament.
In a letter to which elDiario.es has had access, the chief inspector of the UDEF reveals the name and objective of two of the maneuvers that the Police deployed in 2016, when Podemos aimed to govern in coalition with the PSOE. These are the Bolívar and Venus operations. Both were “secret” in nature and were carried out under a PP Government.
The inspector has revealed to the National Court that she was sent to the United States by the Police Directorate in April 2016, that upon her return she consulted reserved databases to discover possible trips by Pablo Iglesias to Venezuela and that the Prosecutor’s Office later refused to open an investigation with such flimsy evidence.
That operation was baptized by the UDEF as ‘Bolívar’ and it collapsed after three months. By then, the newspaper ‘Abc’ had published the accusations against Podemos, just six weeks before the general elections.
The new front that the Ministry of the Interior wanted to open to Podemos focused on alleged financing from Venezuela and its concealment from the Spanish Treasury. The ‘modus operandi’ was the same as in other operations of the PP political brigade: police accusations published on the front page of a media outlet that are never investigated in court.
In its May 13, 2016 edition, the newspaper ABC reproduced an excerpt from the statement that the former Minister of Finance of Venezuela, Rafael Isea, had made before “two agents” of the Spanish Police the previous month in New York. In its statement, Isea assured, “without any doubt,” that Hugo Chávez personally signed payments of more than 7 million euros to the CEPS foundation, with which founders of Podemos had been linked. The concealment of these income from the public treasury constituted the true interest of the police.
It would take three years for it to emerge that it was not “two agents” who interviewed Isea that day in New York. This was revealed by a recording published on April 3, 2019 by moncloa.com. In it, Chief Inspector José Ángel Fuentes Gago, one of the pillars of the political brigade, appears speaking. The voice of the inspector and her immediate superior at the UDEF is not heard. But there is that of Fuentes Gago telling the former Chavista minister that he is there with “a mandate” from the then President of the Government of Spain, Mariano Rajoy.
In reference to Podemos, Fuentes Gago states: “If we prevent it from reaching [Podemos] to the Government, better for everyone.” José Ángel Fuentes Gago declared himself under investigation on October 29 in the case of the dirty war against Podemos, to which the testimony of the now inspector is now incorporated. Before Judge Santiago Pedraz, Fuentes Gago declared that he did not recognize his voice in that recording.
The UDEF whitens dossiers
In May 2016, elDiario.es was able to identify the two police officers who signed Rafael Isea’s statement, based on the professional license numbers that appeared in the photos of documents that Abc reproduced. They weren’t just any two police officers. They were the head of the Unit against Economic and Fiscal Crime (UDEF), José Manuel García Catalán, and an inspector, who acted as group leader in the same unit.
It is that inspector, named Silvia, who has just informed Pedraz of the reasons why he appears in police databases consulting information about Pablo Iglesias. In just five paragraphs of her writing, the inspector tries to give the appearance of normality to the trip to New York. But in such a small space all the threads with which the dirty war against Podemos was manufactured during the Government of the Popular Party emerge.
The UDEF is a central structure of the Police dedicated to major corruption cases. The use of such a unit, destined to work under the orders of a judge, was a recurring mechanism to launder information from confidants or the notes prepared by Villarejo and other commissioners in the political brigade, about Catalonia and later against Podemos.
Inspector Silvia explains that she and her boss, José Manuel García Catalán, were “commissioned” to travel to New York by the Deputy Operational Directorate of the Police, the structure where the political brigade was based and in which the commanders who are going to be tried for parapolice espionage of Luis Bárcenas.
The objective of the trip was, as the inspector explains, “to take a statement from a person of Venezuelan nationality residing there, who had held a position of great responsibility in the Government of his country, since he wanted to report facts that he considered criminal.” .
Once Rafael Isea’s testimony was collected, Silvia and the other two police officers returned to Madrid. The chief inspector assures that it was then, on April 14, 2016, when Operation Bolívar was officially opened. “Their objective was to verify the veracity of what was stated in the complaint and continue with the investigations if appropriate,” according to the testimony of the chief inspector.
In the story before the judge, the inspector says that only three months after the Bolívar operation, in July, the investigation went to “passive” status because “sufficient evidence of a crime was not found.” Previously, the prosecutors of the National Court had listened to Silvia, who presented Isea’s statement to them “in an informal meeting.” The Public Ministry considered that there was no evidence of a crime and replied that it did not intend to open investigation proceedings with such weak testimony.
The media paw
The operation had failed in its supposed objective of clarifying an alleged crime, but not in the real one: harming a party with parliamentary representation and options to govern.
The political brigade – whose existence the Interior never acknowledged – had obtained information according to which former Minister Isea could collaborate in offering information about a rival of the Popular Party, the party that governed at the time. With the promise of refuge in Spain for him and his family, Isea made a series of claims that were never confirmed. It was the least of it. A newspaper published serious accusations of Chavista financing of Podemos one month before the general elections. The damage was already done.
The letter sent by the chief inspector to the court of the National Court is relevant for a second issue: in it, a police commander acknowledges having carried out consultations on the reserved databases that the party has denounced and that Pedraz is investigating as part of the maneuvers against Podemos.
In this sense, Chief Inspector Silvia assures that she consulted whether Pablo Iglesias, then a parliamentarian and spokesperson for the third party with the largest representation, “had traveled to Venezuela on any occasion and/or if he had had contacts with any Venezuelan authority in Spanish territory.”
The case opened in the National Court
The Central Court of Instruction number 5 of the National Court investigates a complaint filed by Podemos against political leaders and officials of the Ministry of the Interior during the Government of Mariano Rajoy. At the moment, the former number two in the department, Francisco Martínez, and several police officers from the political brigade are accused.
Within the framework of this operation, thousands of queries arose in police databases in 2014 and 2015 regarding Podemos deputies. In a letter to the court, Martínez assures that they respond to routine inquiries from the Police, that many are about people with the same name or surnames as Podemos leaders and that even others are related to protection functions for politicians at that time.
One of the operations investigated in the Pedraz Court is the trip to New York, paid for with public funds, of at least three Police officials in April 2016. Also the writing and publication of the PISA report, on the alleged financing of Podemos through Iran and Venezuela through an audiovisual production company.
In 2019, after the recording that the Spanish police made of Rafael Isea was published, Chávez’s former minister explained to La Sexta that what the police showed him for him to ratify was a copy of a document, and not the original, in which he recognized his own signature and that of Commander Chávez.
The document in question was an alleged payment of 7.1 million euros to CEPS in 2008 for all the advisory services provided in the Caribbean country to various ministries and public organizations by the foundation. Before creating Podemos, most of the founders of Podemos appeared in CEPS, such as Pablo Iglesias, Íñigo Errejón, Carolina Bescansa and Juan Carlos Monedero.
Operation Venus: save the PISA report
Chief Inspector Silvia has revealed to the judge that one of her subordinates and herself also made other inquiries about Pablo Iglesias based on another investigation, which tried to whitewash the PISA report. That dossier, whose authorship no one recognizes, was delivered by the Police themselves to the UDEF so that they could start an investigation that also failed. The UDEF agents spent ten months investigating, between February and December 2016.
The dynamic repeats itself. El Confidencial and Okdiario published the contents of the dossier in January 2016, coinciding with the start of negotiations between PSOE and Podemos to form a left-wing Government. The UDEF investigation was baptized in this case as Operation Venus.
The suspicions of financing from Iran and Venezuela contained in the dossier had been rejected by the Supreme Court in April 2016 and by the National Court in July. It mattered little for the UDEF to continue investigating the dossier until December of that year, as Chief Inspector Silvia reveals in her letter.
Operation Venus had started in February 2016. That same month, the UDEF had forwarded the suspicions contained in the PISA report to the Court of Accounts, in the midst of the scandal over the apocryphal nature of the dossier published in media related to the PP Government. It is now known that the specialized unit continued investigating secretly until December of that year.
In her version of events, Chief Inspector Silvia states that one of her subordinates included the name of Pablo Iglesias Turrión in the People application of the National Police. Subsequently, Silvia decided that, “given the sensitivity of the people investigated, only she would proceed to consult databases.”
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