The founder of Podemos Miguel Urbán Crespo has finally managed to get a judge to hear his testimony about the setup plotted against him from State security during the Government of Mariano Rajoy. Judge Santiago Pedraz has summoned Urbán as a witness in the case he is leading in the National Court for the police maneuvers against Podemos in the first term of the PP Executive, more intense in 2016, when the party was close to governing.
elDiario.es revealed in May 2025 how Urbán was investigated in that period by the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of the Interior based on the testimony of a confidant who claimed to have seen him sell 40 kilos of cocaine on the upper floor of a pub in Malasaña.
The crazy story, monitored by one of the leaders of the PP political brigade, included how Urbán had confessed out loud that the cocaine was from Venezuela and that its sale was intended to finance Podemos. Before leaving, the then MEP would have dumped cocaine on the bar counter and invited all the customers to celebrate the operation. Urbán, the confidant said, was a regular retail dealer in Malasaña.
That police commander is José Luis Olivera, now retired, prosecuted in the Kitchen case and at the time of the events director of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO). His signature is on the documents that motivated the opening of the Anti-Drug Prosecutor’s Office proceedings revealed by this media. On November 24, Olivera declared at the National Court, as a witness, that he only gave information from a CITCO source and that he did not even know for sure, at the height of Podemos, who Urbán was, so he had to look him up on Wikipedia.
During his statement, Olivera transferred responsibility for Operation Cardenal – as the investigation into Urbán was named – to two subordinates at the CITCO stage, a commissioner and a chief inspector who the judge has called to testify on January 22 as witnesses at the request of the private prosecution, carried out by Podemos. The day before, the statement of the victim of the montage, Miguel Urbán, is scheduled.
The investigation into Urbán turned out to be a pretext to make the jump to the accounts of Podemos and its then leader, Pablo Iglesias. In the case, the Anti-Drug police officer who used the opening of Operation Cardenal to track the former general secretary of the party in the databases is listed as being investigated. When he testified at the National Court, he assured that whenever someone is investigated for drugs, their closest environment is consulted.
Of all the people that the Police considered close to Urbán, the Police chose Pablo Iglesias and a Podemos senator with a Basque surname and former militancy in the ETA that acted during the Franco regime, Josetxo Arrieta.
The first complaint
The complaint that gave rise to the investigation of the dirty war against Podemos included a conversation between the number two of the Interior Francisco Martínez and one of the commissioners of the political brigade. On January 30, 2016, the Secretary of State for Security said via WhatsApp: “Those from Podemos who had a record, were you able to confirm anything?” When Commissioner Enrique García Castaño answers “nothing,” Martínez writes: “Cagüenlaputa!” The search on the background of Arrieta, who benefited from the 1977 Amnesty Law, had been carried out on the previous January 8.
Among the documentation that the National Court is now requesting from the Police Udyco are the “files of those investigated” that would have been prepared within the framework of Operation Cardenal, as well as “all the people” that the anti-drug unit searched in the police databases with the excuse of the drug trafficking investigation into Miguel Urbán.
Also at the request of Podemos, Judge Pedraz has requested all the “coordinatable data” that the police had entered into these databases to carry out their searches and any “internal work documents, notes or messages” that appear in the police files about the aforementioned Operation Cardenal. The judge also addresses CITCO, the body that Olivera directed and from which the informant’s statement came from, from which any document related to the investigation into Urbán is requested.
Urbán will testify as a witness in the case for the dirty war against Podemos after a judge of the National Court, at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, rejected a complaint he filed in relation to the montage. The Criminal Chamber confirmed this rejection due to a question of jurisdiction, despite the fact that at the time of the events Urbán was a European parliamentarian.
The cause of the dirty war against Podemos has progressed slowly since the complaint was admitted for processing, in February 2024, and thanks to the proceedings requested by the party, in the face of the inaction of the National Court Prosecutor’s Office and between confessions and documentation that prove police maneuvers against the political formation.
Source: www.eldiario.es
