The investigation of Cristóbal Montoro, and also the one that has not prospered despite the indications of using information reserved as Minister of Finance, were subject to a underground confrontation in the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office in which the Civil Guard was involved. In full clash between the prosecutor of the case, Carmen García Cerdá, and the Chief of Anti -Corruption, Alejandro Luzón, the first complained that the agents of the Central Operational Unit (UCO), unlike the Tax Agency and the Mossos d’Esquadra, maintained a passive attitude in the investigations. “They don’t want to do anything,” Garcia Cerdá wrote to Luzón.
The Chief Prosecutor of Anti -Corruption maintains the performance of the prosecutor of the Montoro case for discrepancies in his performance, which is protected at all times by number two of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, Antonio Romeral. The application to the Ministry of Finance of the Electronic Post Offices that had passed through the consulting firm Economic Team, from the finding of messages that aimed at a plot of corruption, caused the first disagreements between the prosecutor of the case and its boss.
The confrontation broke out when, from those emails collected from the Treasury, indications appeared that Montoro and his team made partisan and personal use of the confidential data of the taxpayers. The messages also betrayed that the minister was informed in an email address in which the last name “Montoro” ([email protected]) did not appear, according to the Tax Agency and the Mossos d’Esquadra. Prosecutor García Cerdá asked that that mailbox be turned and a separate piece will be opened. He never got it for the opposition of Luzón.
In the exchange of formal writings between the prosecutor of the case and the Chief of Anti -Corruption there is one of June 21, 2023, to which eldiario.es has had access, in which García Cerdá, apart from insisting on his intention to investigate, moves a complaint to light that is collected in the following paragraph: “Waiting for your express pronouncement I continue to analyze the emails incorporated into the cause since, as you know how much you know. [Romeral, segundo de Anticorrupción]the members of our Civil Guard Support Unit, under the orders of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Balas and the group’s commander, do not want to do anything, I do not know the true reasons for this decision. ”
Cristóbal Montoro, nine senior positions of his ministry and another 18 people are investigated for seven crimes related to the purchase by the gas employer of two regulatory projects of the Rajoy government that were later approved and that meant millions of euros in tax savings. The dynamic was to hire high sums to economic team, where members of the Montoro team had passed or appeared, having been the minister himself who founded the consultant in 2006.
While investigating in 2017 the illegal expansion of a gas plant, the Mossos d’Esquadra found several messages that pointed to a plot of corruption in the dome of the Ministry of Finance in which Cristóbal Montoro himself would participate. The Autonomous Police informed the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and the Court investigating the original case, Tarragona number 2 began to investigate.
The fact that economic team had its headquarters in Madrid, like the Ministry of Finance, made the prosecutor Carmen García Cerdá propose the formation of a joint team between the Mossos and the unit assigned to the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor’s Office of the Civil Guard, under the Department of Economic Crimes and against the corruption of the UCO led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Balas.
The name of the armed institute command began to appear in the media when a recording was published in which an alleged envoy of the then Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, asked a prosecuted entrepreneur at the National Court to give him information to end the career of the Civil Guard command, which he accused of acting against the Government and the PSOE. Balas is the police head of the cause of corruption that maintains in provisional prison to Cerdán.
You listen to Montoro’s mail, safe
The judge of Tarragona came to authorize telephone listeners to four members of the Montoro team, which barely lasted twenty days, before the anti -corruption chief prosecutor intervened the performance of his subordinated and requested his annulment, which finally agreed to the Provincial Court of Tarragona. In this period of time, follow -ups were practiced in which the Central Civil Guard Operating Unit participated with the Mossos. Then, the UCO has prepared a report on financial products of economic team partners. And so far his participation.
Prosecutor García Cerdá planned at the end of 2022 a jump in the investigation to Montoro and his fiscal brigade. On December 12, he signed a letter addressed to the UCO in which he requested an “urgent” report of the progress in the investigation, including the analysis of the seized emails, and “an operational report” in which to support the entry and record in the “homes and headquarters that can house documentation and relevant test sources for the investigation”.
In his letter he remembered the civil guards a car of the judge of the case in which Judge Rus Varela established that “both bodies”, referring to Mossos and Civil Guard, had to inform about the content of the mails. But what was found was a door of the UCO, which joined the opposition of the Chief of Anti -Corruption, Alejandro Luzón, and his number two, Antonio Romeral, to expand the investigation against the once ‘Almighty’ Minister of Finance of the Popular Party.
On December 28, 2022, 16 days after the prosecutor’s request, the UCO responded in writing in which the civil guards interpreted that they had already responded to the judge’s order collaborating in the report that the Mossos had written. The writing agent took the opportunity to qualify the conclusions of the regional police as “obtained exquisitely.”
For the rest, the civil guards, he added, had already asked the judge to give them permission to make a report of the financial situation of the investigated and had been the absence of a letter from García Cerdá supporting the diligence which had made the judge not yet authorized it. The signatory agent who did not know a report by the Tax Agency on the possible existence of “complex corporate structures and testaferros” added, an issue that the prosecutor alleged to justify the entries and records.
The conclusion of the UCO is a guarantee allegation that refers to the alleged severity of the measures placed by the prosecutor against those investigated, considering them excessive. “Sufficient indications do not work in this unit to prepare input and record application report, especially when much less burdensome measures have been requested such as the analysis of bank products already referred to, and have not been authorized within the framework of the cause.” Bang.
Sources of the Civil Guard attribute the refusal to follow the instructions of the prosecutor of the Montoro case to the fact that its agents assigned to anti -corruption follow the criteria and indications of the head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office, Alejandro Luzón, contrary to expanding the investigation and much less in the address of practicing records. The same sources add that the UCO should not enter the dispute between the chief prosecutor and his subordinate.
Other sources in the case report the discomfort with which the UCO participated from the beginning in a case that, despite having national relevance, had as its main active force the Mossos d’Esquadra, the Catalan Autonomous Police with which the climate of cooperation from the independence process was seriously deteriorated.
Last February, the UCO gave the judge a report that started 16 months before about the traceability of the almost 700,000 euros declared by economic team that charged the gas lobby. In the report, UCO researchers do not find anomalies at the destination that the consultant members founded by Montoro gave to those declared funds. The attestation did not influence the judge to raise the secret in June, three months later, confirming that Montoro and nine of his high positions of the Treasury are still investigated.
The Mossos: “We must give a definitive impulse to the investigation”
The absence of records, of the Montoro mail dump in the Treasury, the interruption of the follow -ups and telephone punctures are a consequence of the refusal of the chief prosecutor to propose to the court a separate piece that investigated the fiscal brigade that allegedly operated in the Treasury during the Montoro mandate.
In the intercepted mails it was clear that the senior positions of the Ministry reported to Montoro from issues that were away from the minister’s tasks at the head of the Ministry and descended to give details of others such as the most serious case of corruption in the history of the PP, that of Box B, the tax situation of critical journalists with Montoro, that of declared enemies of the minister, such as Rodrig Can.
On November 21, 2022, a month before the UCO portar to the prosecutor, the Mossos d’Esquadra had delivered a report to the judge of analysis of the seized emails, which concluded radically differently. The Autonomous Police assured that “a point of the investigation that aims at the participation of important high positions of the Ministry of Finance, certain fiscal advisors of recognized prestige and certain responsible for business associations in behaviors that could be constitutive of alleged crimes against public administration” had been achieved.
And in that sense, “this instructor unit would understand reasonable – the Mossos concluded – and in any case adjusted to law, that the Fiscal Ministry exercised the investigating leadership urging [Vuestra Ilustrísima] to the adoption of measures that allowed to give a definitive impulse to the investigation ”.
It was not enough. Now, to refuse to accept the personation of some of those affected, the judge alludes to the Board of Anti -Corruption Prosecutors where the criteria of all of them were imposed, by 18 votes to 5. Judge Rus Varela has ended up deciding once the Light position and not the prosecutor of the case. Several of those affected by the Montoro information traffic have already announced that the decision of the Judge of Tarragona will resort to the Provincial Court.
Source: www.eldiario.es
