The last sewers of the State, a group of police commanders at the service of the Popular Party Government, organized the drug conspiracy against Miguel Urbán and Podemos based on the incredible story of a confidant that elDiario.es reproduces today. One of those police commanders, located at the top of the Ministry of the Interior, told the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office that a collaborator claimed to have seen the founder of Podemos and European parliamentarian scattering cocaine on the counter of a bar in Malasaña to celebrate the sale of 40 kilos of that substance. The transaction would have occurred in November 2015 and with it, the confidant said, the party that at that time had the possibility of governing was going to be financed.
Last May, elDiario.es revealed the details of this setup against Podemos when the party was led by Pablo Iglesias. The maneuvers appear collected in secret proceedings that the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office opened, and closed three months later, as a result of the reports that the PP political brigade sent it to try to link Podemos with drug trafficking. The documents that prove the setup have finally been incorporated into the investigation being followed by the National Court into the maneuvers of the Ministry of the Interior against the political formation during the last PP Government.
Among these proceedings is the testimony that a prominent member of the PP political brigade, Commissioner José Luis Olivera, used to attack Podemos. It is just half a page written by the Police in which the confidant, Hugo Ch., limits himself to filling in some blank spaces, making an assessment of his handwriting at the end, and signing the document. Below appear two other signatures from other people related to Hugo who joined the montage.
The confidant says that in November 2015, Miguel Urbán, then a member of the European Parliament for Podemos, showed up at the pub where he worked, a place in Malasaña called Nueva Visión. According to his story, Urbán went up, together with the owner of the pub, to his home, just above the premises, and there sold 40 kilos of cocaine to a third party.
“After approximately 40 minutes, the aforementioned Miguel Urbán came back down with another backpack, full of money and threw a bag of cocaine on the bar, inviting anyone who wanted to. For this reason, the owner of the bar ordered me to close the door of the pub,” the confidant supposedly told the Police on February 9, 2016. In December 2015, Podemos obtained a historic result, opening up the possibilities of a coalition government with the PSOE. The agreement did not come and the elections would be repeated in June.
In that semester that separated the two general elections, police pseudo-reports against the political formation were lavished on the front pages of the media related to the PP. The drug setup would remain secret because after three months the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office decided to close its investigation. The chief prosecutor understood that, no matter how many reports were provided by the Police's Unit against Economic and Fiscal Crime (UDEF), its Unit against Drugs and Organized Crime (Udyco) and even the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF), there was not a single indication that made it credible that Miguel Urbán had trafficked cocaine from Venezuela to finance Podemos.
The documentation incorporated into the cause of the dirty war against Podemos leaves some new details. The informant assured the Police, and then the Anti-Drug Prosecutor, that the buyer of the cocaine could be a member of the Hell Angels, the criminal organization formed from the international group of bikers.
The Police anti-drug agents did not miss the opportunity to contextualize the confidant's comment in one of the reports: “Hell Angels is known for being one of the most active in the commission of multiple criminal acts at the European level, having a lot of criminal activity in our country.” “This Group 42 of the Central Narcotics Brigade – it continued – carried out an investigation last year on some members of the gang, managing to seize the amount of 300 kilograms of cocaine and the arrest of four people (…) displaced to Spain from Canada to collect the narcotic substance.”
Urbán's alleged role as a trafficker was just a pretext to investigate the political party. This is demonstrated by the fact that, just after the waiter's confession, the Police introduces an informative note, without a heading, date or signature of any police official. In this note, the sale of drugs is part of a broader activity within the financing of Podemos.
“The data received point to certain laundering actions that members of the political party would be carrying out by the method known as 'smurfing', that is, integrating opaque money into the banking circuit, through small amounts that are entered and/or withdrawn, so that together, they represent a very significant amount, which would nevertheless go unnoticed,” the aforementioned note states.
This new and unknown confidant, if he existed, would have told the Police that “the Podemos party would be receiving significant amounts of cash that they launder, ordering its members to periodically deposit acceptable amounts, such as a few THOUSAND or TWO THOUSAND EUROS, with the concept of donations to entities linked to said party and the same amount is repaid in cash.”
According to the police thesis, the Podemos leaders achieved a double objective: to introduce “into the banking circuit all the cash of dubious origin and difficult justification and at the same time, the apparent donor sees his tax payment reduced since he can deduct the amounts he donates, when presenting his declaration to the Treasury.”
It so happens that the police officers had an example of these “smurfing” practices: Miguel Urbán. In reality, they transfer information that they have collected from Podemos' own website about three donations from the MEP, of 2,000 euros each, to different causes. And now they have it: the Podemos member who traffics drugs then launders the money, in amounts, moreover, much smaller than what he would have obtained by selling 40 kilos of cocaine, 1.2 million euros at the price of the drug on the market.
The proceedings of the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office 4/2016 were closed on July 20, 2016 with an archiving decree signed by its boss, José Ramón Noreña Salto. “Once all the agreed procedures were verified, no progress has been made in the investigations that are the subject of this procedure, so it has not been possible to prove, even indirectly, the commission of criminal acts to continue with the investigation of these procedures.”
The sewers of the PP, in the investigation phase
After the publication in May of elDiario.es, Miguel Urbán tried to appear in the judicial case of the maneuvers of the PP Government against Podemos. Judge Santiago Pedraz rejected it because he considered that he was investigating different facts. Then, Urbán filed a complaint that went to another court, that of María Tardón. The judge relied on the Prosecutor's report to rule out that the complaint gathered sufficient evidence to open an investigation that, on the other hand, would not be the responsibility of the National Court. Urbán appealed to the Criminal Court, pending a ruling.
Meanwhile, the same section that will decide on his complaint has heard an appeal from the defense of Pablo Iglesias in the case that Pedraz is pursuing. The magistrates accepted that the secret Anti-Drug investigations on Urbán were incorporated and that a police officer who, with the justification that the founder of Podemos was being investigated, began to track Pablo Iglesias in restricted Police databases, was once again charged.