Just before everything was jumping through the air, Pedro Sánchez asked for a last exercise of containment to his. Judge Leopoldo Puente had already decreed the lifting of the investigation secret on Thursday morning and the famous report of the Central Civil Guard Unit, which had been written and speculated so much, was about to see the light. The night before, Eldiario.es had advanced that this report contributed very compromising recordings for number 3 of the PSOE and left it to the edge of the imputation. But Santos Cerdán again gave his word in private to the President: that no one could ever incriminate him because he had never participated in conversations about public contracts and commission collection. And Sánchez, as the president himself acknowledged the next day, believed him.
That was the last time Cerdán lied to Pedro Sánchez, although during the same Thursday morning he also cheated the journalists of Congress several times. In an attitude that their closest ranks does not understand, he went to plenary and attended to the press just a couple of hours before the UCO report revealed the performances he has carried out during the last eleven years. “I am completely sure that this report will not imply me on any mistress. I am very calm because I have not committed any illegality,” he said.
The publication of the report that places him as the person who “was in charge of managing the amount and payments” within the alleged corrupt plot that made up with Koldo García and José Luis Ábalos caught him sitting in his seat. I was completely alone, in an eloquent image of the attitude of the socialist bench towards the man in which they say they trusted until the last second. A parliamentary photojournalist captured Cerdán reading what the UCO said of his mobile phone. But at the exit of the plenary, he lying again. “No, I have not read the report. When I know it I will give all the explanations in a press conference.” As it was accredited, I had read that report. And he never offered that appearance.
Precisely that, that of deception, is the feeling that the few socialist positions that have shared these years of work at their side and that attend to the questions of the journalists after the tsunami that has set up legs to the PSOE and the Government. “He has cheated us, he has fooled all this time,” they still repeat in shock in the game. In the Moncloa they do not find explanation either. “I have been denoting everything for two years. It is very serious and we don't understand it.”
To that feeling of betrayal Pedro Sánchez himself came to put words himself during his appearance in Ferraz. “Until this morning I was convinced of the integrity of Santos Cerdán. I was wrong, I shouldn't trust him,” he said before apologizing citizens. The president's version is that he has also been deceived all these years in which they have worked side by side. Many leaders of the party feel representatives in the words of the president of Navarra, María Chivite, a person from the Cerdán's greatest circle. “What I have read in the UCO report does not correspond to my friend,” he said in tears.
But before leaving, Cerdán had the daring to place a couple of deceptions more in his farewell letter. The first, that the decision to resign departed from him. According to Pedro Sánchez himself narrated during his appearance and according to his team, it was the president who quoted him in the Moncloa to demand his resignation, to which he responded with a last defense of his innocence in which he came to slide that he did not recognize himself in those conversations that he has already read the whole country.
In his letter he also assured that he would deliver his deputy minutes. That was Thursday, shortly after three in the afternoon. At the close of the Congress Registry this Friday, he had not formalized his resignation, something that in the PSOE there are those who relate to a premeditated strategy of his defense to benefit from the benefits of the aforementation in the cause that looms over him. As long as he is a deputy, the judge cannot, for example, or order a record, or withdraw his passport or monitor his accounts. As Eldiario.es has learned, Cerdán was in Ferraz this Saturday to collect his belongings and transferred to the party that would formalize his resignation as a deputy on Monday.
That end of Santos Cerdán's political career, crowned with the publication of the audios in which he is heard to participate with Koldo and Ábalos in conversations about alleged bites and works of works, involves a trauma in the heart of the PSOE that everyone admits that it will cost to recover. Because Cerdán was not one more, because even his behavior “was at all like Ábalos,” according to his teammates. And because his career in the party since the time of Navarra and during the last years with Sánchez they won the vitola of a “loyal man”, committed to “truly progressive values” and capable of sacrificing himself by virtue of his principles. A challenge of benefits describing those who have worked by their side and that left the sink in an abrupt way in seconds this week.
Because the investigation to Santos Cerdán (Navarra, 1969) who has carried out the UCO reaches until 2013. From that year “numerous messages exchanged between the two appear in which a subordinate-chig link is appreciated”. Santos completely trusts in Koldo: demonstrates towards him “strong confidence,” the researchers write. And they put an example: on July 13, 2014, Cerdán – and highlighted in the team of applicant Pedro Sánchez to the General Secretariat of the PSOE – asks Koldo: “When you finish, you point out as those two have voted that you are missing without anyone seeing you and put both ballots.” Sanchez won those primaries for 16,000 votes of difference against Eduardo Madina and José Antonio Pérez Tapias.
Among them, a Navarrese businessman, Antxon Alonso, who creates the company Servinabar 2000, an instrument of the investigated group to relate to the Macroenterprising actua, the great construction company that will distribute the benefits obtained among its members, always according to the report. According to the UCO, the symbiosis with the construction company was such that in a bar named 'Franky', in Pamplona, false invoices were prepared for alleged meals of employees of Action for “700 or 800 euros”. And the money ended in Koldo's pocket.
Socialist parliamentary spokesman in Navarra in 2015, before his landing for national policy Santos Cerdán had an outstanding organic role in the turbulent life of the Socialist Party during the first steps of Sanchismo. Prior to the emergence of the current president of the Government, he had been one of the most outstanding people of Carme Chacón's candidacy that faced Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba in primary. Role that repeated in the following primary between Sánchez and Eduardo Madina in favor of today Secretary General.
After the internal schism in Ferraz on the night of October 1, 2016 in which the direction of the party evicted its secretary general of the command chair, Sánchez convened an emergency meeting with a small number of faithful in a hotel next to the Madrid station of Chamartín. They remember some of those present to that event that Francina Armengol, Óscar López, Luis Tudanca, Idoia Mendia, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán were there. And today president raised the possibility of appearing again to the primaries after being evicted.
At that time, most moved him that he joined Patxi López's candidacy. Specifically, all but Celis, Ábalos and Cerdán. And of those last three unwavering support, Celis and Ábalos came to show some repair about the convenience of taking the passage to the need to personally protect a politically abrasive man at that time after being expelled from the General Secretariat by his own companions. “Only Santos defended that we had to move on, that the militancy was on after everything that had happened and that, if he presented, he would win from the street,” recalls one of the witnesses of that meeting.
Number two of José Luis Ábalos until 2021, the former Minister of the Ministry of Organization happened, which Pedro Sánchez entrusted. After the outbreak of the 'Koldo Case' there was a situation that, seen with perspective, is surreal. When the corruption scandal exploded and took Koldo and Ábalos ahead, Cerdán, the man who appears in the recordings speaking of contracts by finger and commissions with them, was in charge of going to the personal domicile of the former minister to communicate his expulsion from the party and ask for the delivery of the deputy act, to which Ábalos refused. Among the socialist ranks admit the blush to imagine the content of that conversation between two members of the same corrupt plot.
Last December, Santos Cerdán granted the last interview with a state media. It was at eldiario.es and, asked and reheated by the information involved in the 'Koldo Case', you can see six months later the ease with which he displayed his ability to lie. “Can nobody demonstrate that you have benefited from any illicit activity related to your political career?” “Nobody will ever be able to demonstrate. I have dedicated myself since 2008 to the political activity professionally, and if I have something, it is an impeccable service sheet,” he replied.
Those who shared hours and hours of work in Ferraz with him describe an “unwavering tenacity” that he tested during the most difficult negotiation of how many have faced, at least in the institutional policy: the law of Amnesty to the Catalan procès and the agreement to invest Pedro Sánchez negotiated with Carles Puigdemont by the man who was born in a small Navarrese town of 3,000 inhabitants called Milagro and that for a long time Political trajectory needed an escort to protect against the terror of ETA. That the president entrusts him with such a mission, gives a good account of the level of closeness and confidence that he professed.
After the famous photo with Puigdemont, Santos Cerdán had to take escort for the threats of the ultra -right. And that believed everyone in the PSOE that would be his legacy: that of whom he decided to complicate his life in favor of his country and his party for some principles, not that of the man who managed to deceive everyone every time.
