The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor suspects that retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, in prison since November 2017, participated in the preparation and dissemination of the so-called PISA report (acronym for Pablo Iglesias SA), a false police document on the finances of Podemos used in the war dirty against the formation, and that the same one was elaborated by order of high positions of the Ministry of the Interior during the stage of Jorge Fernández Díaz. During an interrogation of Villarejo on March 28, 2019, to which EL PAÍS has had access, one of the prosecutors comes to ask the police if this apocryphal document was prepared by “order of the Ministry of Interior.”
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Prosecutors were also interested in whether the idea of the report on Iglesias was based on the then deputy operational director of the Police, Commissioner Eugenio Pino, placed by the Government of Mariano Rajoy; Ignacio Cosidó, at that time general director of the National Police and later spokesman for the popular in the Senate; or Francisco Martínez, then Secretary of State for Security and former deputy of the conservatives. “Mr. [José Ángel Fuentes] Gago - a chief inspector linked to the so-called political brigade [the group of police officers dedicated to the espionage of the political rivals of the PP also known as the patriotic brigade] and charged by the espionage of the former PP Luis Luis Bárcenas - He told me that Cosidó ordered it, ”replies Villarejo, who immediately disregards the document and says he learned from the press about its contents. Another police command, Commissioner Enrique García Castaño, charged in other pieces of the summary, pointed before the judge months later to another alleged member of this police group, also Commissioner Andrés Gómez Gordo, as the author of the same.
In October 2018, five months before the Villarejo case opened a separate piece on the alleged espionage of Pablo Iglesias, the judge then dedicated to investigating the maneuvers of the corrupt commissioner already commissioned the National Police to trace among the papers intervened retired commissioner any file referred to the PISA report. The then magistrate instructor, Diego de Egea, received an answer just two months later. The investigators of the Internal Affairs unit sent him a letter detailing that they had actually located files that made "reference" to the report under suspicion and that they were sent on a DVD to be included in a summary. That thread served the Prosecutor's Office to seek more links with the former dome of the Ministry of Interior at the time of Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP).
During the interrogation of Villarejo held on March 28 before the current investigating judge, Manuel García-Castellón, the public ministry is very interested in the PISA report. At the time of the interrogation, the Prosecutor's Office already had the Internal Affairs brief informing them that at the home of the retired commissioner they had located “documentation” that made “reference” to the report on Iglesias, which deals with the alleged irregular financing of the leftist formation and that justice has repeatedly rejected for its lack of "credibility."
The files, which the agents compiled on a DVD labeled as number 4, were sent to the court in a December 2018 report, as stated in the summary of this piece of the Villarejo case, number 10. An investigation line baptized as piece Dina and opened on March 19, 2019 by the National Court, after agents discovered in the home of Boadilla del Monte (Madrid) of Villarejo several computer files with at least three copies of the contents of a mobile phone stolen in November 2015, one month before the general elections of that year, to Dina Bousselham, a collaborator of Iglesias.
The December report is also not the only Internal Affairs reference to the controversial PISA report. In another police brief, from May 2019, the investigators point out to judge García-Castellón that they are also looking for similarities between various information published in January and March 2016 by El Mundo and OK Diario referring to the false report on Podemos and “the working documents in the folders intervened during the registration ”of Villarejo's house.
Trips of the 'patriotic police'
During the interrogation of Villarejo Anticorrupción he is also interested in the travel of agents linked to the patriotic brigade to America to investigate Podemos. The retired commissioner admits that he came to plan to move to Venezuela and the United States to look for data against the formation of lefts, which had just broken into a year earlier in Spanish politics. A “mission” that, before the prosecutor's questions, says that he was commissioned by members of the Interior dome: “Go to the trip to investigate, Mr. Pino or Cosidó entrusts me. Or both, ”he says, before adding that he never got to execute the project and that other policemen traveled instead.
“These expenses were defrayed with reserved funds,” adds Villarejo, also to questions from the public ministry. According to a recording, Fuentes Gago traveled to New York to capture a former Chavista minister to provide data against Pablo Iglesias. He did, as heard in the audio, by "mandate" of Fernández Díaz. However, the trip was not financed with reserved funds, as Villarejo said, but with public funds, according to the documentation sent to Congress by the Interior during the parliamentary commission that investigated the activities of the patriotic brigade and certified its existence.
During the eleven months in which the Dina piece has been subject to summary secrecy, the legal representation of Iglesias and Bousselham has repeatedly requested Judge García-Castellón to practice more proceedings on the PISA report, including the imputation and statement of police officers and journalists, but in all cases the judge has rejected them with the support of the Prosecutor. The argument made is that the report "does not constitute the procedural object of this separate piece", where a crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets is investigated, which is why it considers these inquiries "premature or inadmissible."