The investigation into police maneuvers against Podemos during the Popular Party Government takes a turn once again. The National Court has ordered Judge Santiago Pedraz to return the accused status to an anti-drug police officer who searched for Pablo Iglesias in reserved databases with the excuse that a colleague from the Podemos leadership, Miguel Urbán, was supposedly immersed in investigations for alleged cocaine trafficking.
The Anti-Drug investigation against Urbán had been opened based on the crazy testimony of a confidant, a collaborator of a commissioner of the PP political brigade. The accused police officer tried to argue in his judicial statement that he tracked down Pablo Iglesias because he always does so with the environment of those investigated, in this case Urbán. The prosecutor asked him if he would have acted the same if it had been Mariano Rajoy, but Pedraz considered the question inadmissible and cut it off. After the statement, the judge closed the case against the police officer.
In an order to which elDiario.es has had access, the judges of the higher court in Pedraz consider it “of undoubted relevance” to clarify whether the police officer, in addition to Pablo Iglesias, investigated other people in his environment “lacking political ties, such as those belonging to his family or his circle of friends.” The magistrates are trying to determine whether the anti-drug police officer's argument that the environment of those investigated is always tracked is authentic or an excuse to persecute the then leader of Podemos and deputy of Congress.
The resolution of the Third Section of the Criminal Chamber includes another relevant boost to the investigation. The judges of the higher court order Pedraz to incorporate into his case for the dirty war against Podemos the entire file of the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office on the investigation into Urbán. It includes the story of the confidant and how he came to the Prosecutor's Office with the help of José Luis Olivera, a commissioner prosecuted for espionage against Luis Bárcenas with reserved funds and one of the most important police officers of the time.
The confidant, a waiter at the Nueva Visión pub – in the Madrid neighborhood of Malasaña – stated to the police and the prosecutor that Urbán sold 40 kilos of cocaine to a third party before him, who said there and then that the drug came from Venezuela, that he did it to finance Podemos and that, before leaving with more than a million euros in his pocket, he treated everyone present to drugs and drinks. The confidant, who is identified in the documents that are now incorporated into the judicial case, also assured that he had seen Urbán dealing drugs on the corners of Malasaña on several occasions while he was an MEP.
Based on that story, Commissioner Olivera, then director of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime, convinced the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office to open an investigation into Urbán, in reality a pretext to access Podemos accounts. The unit specialized in Economic Crimes, UDEF, and the unit that handles large-scale drug matters, Udyco, were involved in the work. Even the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF) examined Urbán's accounts in detail.
Three months later, the chief anti-drug prosecutor, José Ramón Noreña, realized that this was leading nowhere and archived the proceedings. Podemos believes that the investigations were not leaked, as happened with other parapolice investigations into the party, because they did not achieve the objective of reaching Podemos' accounts. The maneuvers took place between the general elections of December 2015 and the following ones, in June 2016, while there was an expectation that Podemos would surpass the PSOE and that a progressive government agreement would be reached.
The cause of the dirty war against Podemos
Based on the revelations of the police setup by elDiario.es, Miguel Urbán tried to appear in Pedraz's case for the dirty war against Podemos, but the judge rejected it, alleging that they were different facts. The Pedraz Court is investigating the illegal maneuvers of the Police against Podemos deputies during the time of Mariano Rajoy based on a complaint filed by the party's lawyers.
Urbán chose to explore a second route. The founder of Podemos filed a complaint in the National Court, but it was also unsuccessful. Judge María Tardón recently rejected his admission with arguments such as that the complaint focused on “press news.”
The information from elDiario.es shows the number of secret proceedings opened by the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office based on the police setup, of which numerous details are provided, but neither the prosecutor nor the judge thought that they could be claimed for an eventual investigation.
The lawyers of Podemos and Iglesias had also tried to have the false story of the informant and the police investigations of Urbán based on it be incorporated into the cause of the dirty war. Pedraz refused. But now his cause for the dirty war against Podemos will have the documents of the police cocaine setup.