New obstacle for the investigation of the dirty war against the opposition that was carried out during the last Government of the Popular Party. María Tardón, judge of the National Court, has rejected the complaint filed by Miguel Urbán in relation to the police setup that tried to link him with cocaine trafficking to finance Podemos, the party of which he was founder.
Tardón has accepted point by point the report of the Prosecutor's Office of the National Court, understanding that the complaint is based “on mere clippings from press articles” and should not be admitted. The judge and the prosecutor Julián Salto agree that in this case the doctrine of the Supreme Court is applicable, according to which “the mere contribution of press clippings or similar, without further verification or accreditation, is not useful.” The judge's decision can be appealed before the Criminal Chamber of the National Court.
Two of the most high-profile cases in recent times, those being pursued against the wife and brother of the President of the Government, were opened as a result of complaints from the far-right pseudo-union Clean Hands, which limited itself to attaching journalistic information, some of which was proven false.
Among the news included in Miguel Urbán's complaint is one published by elDiario.es that details how the maneuvers of police commanders against Urbán and Podemos are reflected in secret investigation proceedings by the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office that ended up being archived. As stated in the complaint, these Anti-Drug proceedings are identified by their number, 4/2016 of the specialized Prosecutor's Office, but neither the prosecutor nor the judge have chosen to claim them.
This newspaper revealed last May an invention against Podemos by the PP political brigade that remained secret. In 2016, the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office kept an investigation open for months based on the story of a confidant who had assured the Police that Miguel Urbán sold 40 kilos of cocaine to a third party, with the intermediation of the owner of a legendary pub in the Madrid neighborhood of Malasaña. The confidant even declared that he had seen the then MEP dealing drugs on street corners on several occasions.
Urbán's complaint pointed out the protagonist of the montage, the now-retired commissioner José Luis Olivera. At the time of the events, Olivera was director of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (CITCO). Olivera will sit on the bench for the political brigade's attempt to sabotage the cause of box B of the PP, the Kitchen case. Urbán's representation also requested the indictment of another commissioner, José Manuel García Catalán, at the head of the Unit against Economic and Fiscal Crime of the Police, UDEF, when Jorge Fernández Díaz was Minister of the Interior.
A semester of fury against Podemos
The setup against Urbán took place in the most intense semester of activity for the political brigade, the first half of 2016. This is the period of time that elapsed between the December 2015 elections and the following ones, held in June 2016 with the expectation that Podemos would surpass the PSOE in votes and both would form a coalition government.
On January 12, 2016, the cascade of poisoning had begun to flow to stop the rise of Podemos. That day, two right-wing media published a dossier called PISA (Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima) about the alleged financing of Podemos from Iran and Venezuela. The release of the PISA pseudo-report coincided with the beginning of contacts between parties for the possible formation of a progressive government.
However, the judge and the prosecutor now affirm that Urbán's complaint “does not even specify the exact date on which the crimes would have been committed.” The information attached to the complaint details the date on which the police reports with the hoaxes about Urbán and the various writings from the Anti-Drug Prosecutor's Office were signed within the framework of the open proceedings.
The judge's order and the prosecutor's report argue that the crimes to which Miguel Urbán would have been subjected would have affected his “private sphere” and not in the exercise of his position as a European parliamentarian, as if the police commanders had chosen the founder of Podemos for some reason other than his political activity and his membership in the party that they were fighting with irregular methods.
From there, Judge Tardón and prosecutor Julián Salto – the first prosecutor who had the case of Isabel Díaz Ayuso's partner, now assigned to the National Court – agree that the facts do not fall under the jurisdiction of the National Court. Both assure that Urbán was not a victim representing “high institutions of the State” or its “form of Government.”
Urbán's legal representation chose to classify the facts described in the complaint as slander, intrusion into privacy, documentary falsification, embezzlement and prevarication. The judge determines that they are not crimes that the National Court understands, aimed at drug trafficking, large-scale fraud or terrorism. Furthermore, the specialized court could not claim jurisdiction because they had been committed abroad, they add.
The National Court already knew about Urbán's setup through another means. The Santiago Pedraz Court investigates police maneuvers against Podemos in its own case. Within the framework of that investigation, a query in restricted databases that a police officer made about Pablo Iglesias occurred. It turned out that the police officer, an anti-drug agent, decided to investigate the Podemos leader as part of an investigation against one of his party colleagues, Miguel Urbán, whom a confidant linked to a crazy sale of cocaine.
The prosecutor in the case, Vicente González Mota, reported against the request of Podemos lawyers to claim the Anti-Drug proceedings in the Urbán case and incorporate them into the case of the dirty war against the party. Pedraz assumed the prosecutor's opinion and rejected it, but named the police officer who left a trace with his query in the databases as being investigated.
In the statement, the police officer defended his actions, in the sense of always investigating the environment of someone investigated for drug trafficking. At that point the prosecutor asked him if he would have acted the same if he had been a member of the PP, entering the name of the president of that party into the databases. Pedraz considered the question inadmissible and did not allow the police officer to answer. After the statement, the judge filed the case against the agent of the Crime and Organized Crime Unit (Udyco).
The case in the Pedraz court
Miguel Urbán also tried to have the frame-up against him incorporated into the investigation into the maneuvers that harmed Podemos, but the prosecutor and Judge Pedraz dismissed it, ensuring that it was not related to the events investigated in his court. In this case, the former number two of the Interior with the PP Francisco Martínez and some police commanders are accused. Commissioner Olivera, the originator of the Urbán setup, has testified but as a witness.
The investigations following the informant's false statement about the cocaine transaction included inquiries into Urbán's bank accounts. In Podemos they believe that it was a bridge to access Pablo Iglesias and the party, but that Anti-Drug's decision not to go ahead with something so weak and suspicious prevented the investigations from being leaked to media related to the PP, as happened with other maneuvers against the party.
The case that Pedraz instructs advances amid difficulties. Within the framework of the same, the party's lawyers have extracted from some witnesses confirmations of the prospective investigations against the party in the times of the PP and have obtained obvious inconsistencies in the testimony of those investigated.
Despite this, the judge has rejected the incorporation of the police reports that supported two of the most relevant maneuvers against the party, related to the PISA report – false irregular financing – and the trip of the UDEF leadership to New York to look for data that would harm the party. One of those denounced by Urbán participated without success on that trip and in his interviews, Commissioner José Manuel García Catalán.