Santos Cerdán will fulfill his first month in provisional prison accused of being the leader of the corrupt network of the Koldo case: the alleged agreement between him, former Minister José Luis Ábalos and advisor Koldo García to distribute commissions paid by companies for which public works awards stored. The instructor and the criminal hall are convinced that Cerdán, the man who was everything in the PSOE, was the leader of the group and that he will destroy evidence as soon as he is released, although given the first appearances of money in his environment, for the moment, the magistrate has not even ordered the registration of his properties or his office.
The involvement of Santos Cerdán was known through a report by the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard that analyzed in depth the stash of recordings and messages that Koldo García, right hand of José Luis Ábalos in the Ministry of Transportation, kept on a hard drive in his house. Ten teras of information in which there were five audios recorded by the exassor while talking with Santos Cerdán of companies, awards and alleged bites collected and receivable.
Judge Leopoldo Puente, who has been investigating the part of the case that affects Ábalos and his then advisor, requested the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor to sign the first income in preventive detention of the case since the Supreme Court took over. The judge explained that the recordings intervened to Koldo García were “so explicit” that few doubts fit him that Cerdán, as little, was in charge of “receiving the economic awards, commissions or bites in exchange for which the undue priditions were awarded.”
That June 30, the judge justified the entry into provisional imprisonment of Santos Cerdán in the danger that, if he was still released, he destroyed compromising evidence or could influence other witnesses or accused. The former deputy, Judge Puente then said, had a “privileged knowledge” of a commission system with many unknowns for clearing. Only he, the prison car settled, could “hide, alter or disappear the tests.”
The first indications of money flows between the company Navarra Servinabar 2000, considered key in this faction of the plot, and the surroundings of Santos Cerdán have been known recently. The Navarra hacienda has informed the bridge magistrate that Belén Cerdán, sister of the expolitic, charged 22,200 euros of this company. Subsequently, researchers have detected that their brother -in -law, Antonio Muñoz, charged 62,000 euros more than this company. The Open Commission in the Navarrese Parliament will request the entire list of employees of this company linked to Cerdán and the plot.
Cerdán meets these days a month in provisional prison without the judge having registered his home or his electronic devices. At the moment he has limited himself to sending the UCO to Ferraz Street to clone his corporate email, he has asked for the working life of the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE and has launched an expert to certify the authenticity of the recordings that Koldo García made hidden over the years.
Both the judge and the Appeals Chamber have made it clear in several recent cars that still do not know many details of the plot of alleged commissions in whose cusp they place Santos Cerdán, considering it necessary to keep him in prison until he clarified those blind points about the money: how much they charged, how they charged him and where he came from. For now, the judge has not ordered the registration of his home, something that was done with the rest of the defendants, nor after his family has announced that they move to Navarra.
Already in his prison car the judge explained that, in the first days of imputation, Cerdán was still a deputy and that “prevented him.” At that time, said the magistrate, “it could have eventually be effective by unpredictable.” Implying, therefore, that the judge resigns to any evidence, if there is destroyed.
The calculations on the “booty”
The cause in which Cerdán now remains imprisoned as a split of the 'Operation Delore', research on the sale of masks from companies in exchange for favors and commissions to the plot. The Supreme Court began to investigate whether part of that favor treatment consisted of money or other gifts to José Luis Ábalos, then Minister of Transportation, and reached Santos Cerdán when the UCO embodied in a report what he had found on a hard disk in Koldo García: conversations recorded with the two secretaries of the PSOE organization over the years.
The Civil Guard then left the suspicion that the judge has now wielded to send Cerdán to prison: “He was responsible for managing the amount and payments.” “550 and from there we discounted. Seville I will say that they put it in writing and I give it to you,” Cerdán told Garcia in one of those conversations. According to the researchers, they referred to the gifts exits from the works of the Centennial Bridge of the Andalusian capital.
Bridge understands that it is “disposable” that Cerdán will act “for the benefit” of Koldo García and José Luis Ábalos and suspects that he had also had money, something that the accused denies and that the magistrate, for the moment, has not been able to find. The car included an intuitive calculation of what should be the total amount of illegality: “The steering loot obtained, in the surroundings of one million euros, represents an unusually minimal percentage within the framework of this kind of criminal operations,” the judge speculated.
The Appeals Chamber, which supervises the entire procedure and resolves the resources of the defendants, has closed ranks several times with Judge Puente. To praise the “Franciscan patience” that, they say, has the instructor to support some strategies of the defenses, until the endorsement granted a few days ago to the provisional prison of Cerdán.
A car that increases the number of unknowns that, according to the judges, justify the policy of the politician in Soto del Real. The case progresses, they say, “without the investigation having revealed all companies that were finally benefited; nor what subjects represented them and maintained contact with the appellant; nor how the payment was addressed and then the money was illegally obtained; not even if certain deposits or assets that have been obtained on the occasion of their criminal activity subsist.”
“They are still unknown,” the “Occults of Payment” methods supposedly used by Cerdán, Ábalos and García to channel the alleged commissions came to recognize the room. The intention seems, therefore, to keep Cerdán in prison while the judge continues to have those suspicions and cannot answer those questions. The Anti -Corruption Prosecutor's Office led by Alejandro Luzón does not seem willing to relieve the measures that weigh on it as long as the evidence does not appear by another means.
The equivalent of 65 million folios
The cause is pending, above all, what the Civil Guard finds on the hard drive of Koldo García Izaguirre. About information about information, which according to the judge equals “65 million pages”, in which investigators hope to find keys about the route of money and the alleged commissions. At the moment the magnifying glass is put on very specific works, most of them awarded to act when it was in UTE with Servinabar 2000, a company of which Cerdán weighed even being a shareholder.
Santos Cerdán's defense arguments, for the moment, have not prospered. In addition to denying having participated in any Amaño and having charged or distributed commissions, he has alluded to a persecution as a consequence of his leading role in negotiations with Basque and Catalan nationalists for the last investiture of Pedro Sánchez. Both the instructor and the room have rejected these arguments flat.
Nor has it helped him to affirm that the private contract that he bought Servinabar actions never executed and that it was a movement made at a time when he did not know if he was going to continue in politics. Nothing explains, says the Supreme, that the businessman Antxon Alonso has kept his copy of the contract for so many years. Now it remains to be seen what movements the judge does after discovering, through the Treasury, that two relatives of Cerdán charged Servinabar 2000.
At the moment in the Supreme Court, the content of the recordings weighs more than the denial of all the accused to recognize any type of amaño or commission. From the entrepreneurs indicated to the general director of Roads investigated, everyone crashes against the audios wall that Koldo García Izaguirre began to hide and hidden when he began to feel aggrieved by his closest collaborators.
According to investigators, most of the commissions are actually pending collection. Cerdán, as can be seen from the audios, managed “economic consideration” for Ábalos and Koldo for a total value of 620,000 euros although most of them, 450,000 euros, would be “pending fertilizer.” The unknowns, at least for now, are the ones that carry the lead in the cause that keeps the Government of Pedro Sánchez in daily tension while the data of the Navarra Treasury emerge the first economic relations between one of the key companies of the plot and the family of Santos Cerdán.