The 10 clandestine actions orchestrated by the Fernández Díaz police

The President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez, at an event in 2014. Javier Lizon / EFE

Jorge Fernández Díaz entered his office of the Interior Ministry for the first time on December 22, 2011, days after Mariano Rajoy's PP won the general elections.

As soon as he entered, before even receiving the leather wallet from the hands of his predecessor in office, the socialist Antonio Camacho, the veteran PP politician asked him a strange question:

"Have you committed any irregularity?"

Camacho, surprised, tells that he said no, and a few minutes later Fernández Díaz solemnly declared to journalists:

- Let everyone know that I know that the Ministry of the Interior has never suspended the rule of law.

Nor will he leave ...

Perhaps that was the purpose of Fernández Díaz, but the truth is that only a few months later a series of apocryphal police reports began to emerge that spread false news about the Catalan politicians embarked on the independence adventure.

The PP police leadership repeated similar maneuvers - dark, without authorization or judicial control - during the following five years.

The former minister has now been charged with his

Francisco Martínez, and half a dozen police charges for the alleged illegal espionage of former PP Treasurer Luis Bárcenas, a secret operation paid for with funds reserved to destroy evidence against the Government of Mariano Rajoy.

All the operations reported had similar characteristics: they were not controlled, ordered or authorized by a judge;

in many cases they fabricated false evidence against adversaries of the Executive that they leaked to certain media;

they obtained documents against pro-independence leaders through extortion practices;

or they stole documents that could put the government in trouble.

EL PAÍS reconstructs ten of its actions based on the testimony of its victims.

1.

The then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, had called elections in Catalonia for November 25, 2012 in order to obtain a sovereign majority.

In the previous months, members of the police launched an information intoxication campaign through alleged reports laden with serious accusations against Mas and other leaders.

“I had breakfast one morning with a cover of

saying that I had money in Switzerland.

It was absolutely untrue.

I spent the rest of the campaign trying to prove something I couldn't prove, my innocence, because it was all a lie.

Nobody believed me.

It cost me, for sure, quite a few deputies, we lost 12. On a personal level, this destroyed his last months of life for my father, ”recalls Mas.

The former president is convinced that this happened "with the approval of La Moncloa."

Rajoy never raised the subject in their meetings, "but the personal tune changed."

Mas denounced the newspaper, but the case was closed.

"The judge said that the journalists had checked the report with the Ministry of the Interior and told them it was true."

He has taken it to the European courts and is still awaiting the outcome.

"What you think is that anything goes, that the rule of law is shamelessly circumvented and that the courts, instead of protecting you, file", reflects Mas.

“It was a campaign by a political apparatus, the PP, accompanied by a media apparatus and a para-police apparatus.

Then it was never known again ”.

The basis for the accusations was a police report without a stamp, no signature, or date.

The scandal led the ministry to commission an investigation into the chief commissioner for Internal Affairs, Marcelino Martín Blas, who told it like this in the Catalan Parliament: “We discovered that the report was a short-and-paste of other official reports to which someone, we did not know who , had added a little salt, in the form of accusations of evasion of money to tax havens of Mas and others ”.

None of that was true.

2.

The Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, had commissioned his

Francisco Martínez, to speak with a veteran police officer, José Manuel Villarejo, about an issue that complicated the life of Ignacio González, then vice president of the Community of Madrid.

The press published at that time (autumn 2012) that González was renting a penthouse in Estepona at a much lower price than the market price and for which he paid almost half of his public salary every month.

González had met with Villarejo and with the curator Enrique García Castaño in a cafeteria in Puerta del Sol in November 2011. Villarejo offered to fix his problems, but he did something else, true to his style: he recorded him, kept the tape and he removed it four years later (on March 9, 2015, three months before the regional elections) to sink González's political career.

Villarejo boasted to his friends that he had caused González's downfall by leaking his recorded conversation.

The PP was aware of this operation and regretted it at the last moment, according to the commissioner.

“I called them,” says Villarejo, “and I told them: 'Hey, I'm trying to stop the recording but I don't know if it's going to be possible.'

And they say to me: 'Let him continue, because he is very pissed off.

The thrust hits him ”.

Eight years after the case broke out, the judge closed it because it was impossible to prove whether someone gave the attic to González, accused all this time.

3.

Commissioner Villarejo, an "undercover agent," according to his resume, had received orders from the PP since this party was in the opposition and began to suffer the scandal known as the

.

It was in a semi-clandestine meeting in the office of Dolores de Cospedal at the headquarters of the PP on Genova street, in Madrid.

It happened in July 2009, a few months after the case arose, when she told the general secretary of the PP and her husband, Ignacio López del Hierro, that there were a series of agents - among which was included - willing to obstruct the investigation so that the case would damage the party as little as possible.

As in all his appointments, he recorded the conversation: “I have my wallet on one side and my heart on the other.

The heart is yours.

Whenever you govern I have never made money, but whenever the PSOE is there, as they are so disasters, they always entrust me with things ”.

He told them about the attempt to make a

of Gürtel's accountant, Luis Bárcenas,

disappear

and that he had been warning PP leaders of the police records and other movements.

Cospedal's husband asked her: "Would you be in a position, for example, to do some specific work on songs?"

And she added: "Don't worry about discretion."

4. A botched operation in search of Bárcenas' secrets (June 2013-June 2015).

Four years after that semi-clandestine appointment at the headquarters of the PP, Villarejo and Inspector Andrés Gómez Gordo, former general director with Cospedal in the Government of Castilla-La Mancha, handled the strings of Operation Kitchen, designed, according to the judicial instruction, to steal the secrets that former treasurer Luis Bárcenas kept.

Villarejo and Gómez Gordo captured the confidant Sergio Ríos, Bárcenas' driver and former driver of the PP politician Francisco Granados.

For 2,000 euros a month for two years, between June 2013 and June 2015, Ríos was the mole for the police group.

About 70 officers were employed to follow Bárcenas' wife, Rosalía Iglesias.

In this operation a not inconsiderable factor appeared in the adventures of the

PP

, the botch.

On one occasion, Villarejo pressured the driver to obtain the treasurer's wife's mobile number, and then tapped it.

Ríos tried by making a call to himself one day when she left him in the car for a moment, but then he couldn't delete the outgoing call to avoid being discovered.

The driver was rewarded with a place in the police, where he still works.

It was about stealing key documents for the future of the PP and that they were never known.

But the documents they stole were irrelevant and, in addition, the agents leaked them to the press before the judge had them in their possession.

5. Pujol's accounts in Andorra end up with a bank and reports of extortion (June 2014).

At the end of 2012, a path was opened in the investigation against the Pujol family that would go far.

The clan had already been the subject of ghost reports published in

in the previous months ("The Pujols have 137 million in Geneva, according to the Police").

But the investigation began to crystallize when María Victoria Álvarez, Jordi Pujol Jr.'s ex-girlfriend, told the police what she knew about his accounts in Andorra, and then before the judge.

The police were on the track, but they had to find the money.

Until, in the spring of 2014, agents under the command of Eugenio Pino (the deputy operational director of the police) went on the attack against the Banca Privada d'Andorra (BPA) to collaborate.

They said they wanted information on the Pujol accounts or would go against the Banco de Madrid (BM), its Spanish subsidiary, according to the owners of the entity.

Joan Pau Miquel, CEO of BPA, met with the head of Internal Affairs, Marcelino Martín-Blas, at the Villamagna hotel in Madrid in June 2014, and handed him a piece of paper with the account number, Pujol's name, his wife and one of his daughters, and a few amounts.

Another police officer in Andorra obtained a screenshot of the Pujol account with a balance of 3.4 million.

But Pino did not go to the judge with the information, published a few days later in

.

Pujol had to acknowledge two weeks later in a statement that he had funds abroad.

A former director of the Bank of Madrid remembers that episode: “The police did not believe that there was only that, they thought that there were more than 100 million and that the bank was not collaborating.

In the midst of these pressures, someone informed the United States of alleged cases of laundering in BPA.

Then FinCen, the American anti-money laundering authority, accused BPA of money laundering with criminal organizations.

And you know how it ended ”.

It ended when the Bank of Madrid, oblivious to the accusations, was intervened in March 2015. “They charged a completely healthy bank for nothing.

They were based on a report from Sepblac [Executive Service of the Prevention and Money Laundering Commission of the Ministry of the Economy] that was inconsistent and that was leaked to the press.

In four trials nothing was proven.

The US later withdrew its report.

More than 200 employees took to the streets;

we sued and they ordered us to pay the costs.

They covered it up.

A sidereal injustice ”, concludes this former director.

Those responsible for the bank sued in Andorra against the police leadership for coercion and blackmail, a case that is still open.

6. The non-existent Swiss account that sank the mayor of Barcelona (October 2014).

At the end of 2014, the situation in Catalonia became tense again with the convening of an illegal independence consultation on November 9.

A month before, on October 2 and 16, Jorge Fernández Díaz met in his Interior office with the Catalan anti-fraud chief, Daniel de Alfonso.

The conversation, recorded with the minister's authorization (as he would later admit), would be revealed in 2016 by

.

In it, both conspire to mount a new operation against the then mayor of Barcelona, ​​Xavier Trias, from CiU.

They talk about a supposed Swiss account of Trias, and they remember how Pujol's was leaked and how well that operation went.

Said and done: days later, on October 27,

published the existence of a supposed Trias account with 12.9 million in Switzerland.

“It was totally untrue.

It was six months before the municipal elections in May 2015. My wife told me: 'Show what you show, the damage has been done, you have lost the elections.

And so it was, ”Trias recalls.

“The most amazing thing is that the parties at that time did not do much;

then, when more information came out of the state sewers, yes, but when it happened to me they didn't pay any attention to me, ”he stresses.

One detail that catches his attention is the botched work of many operations: "There is a degeneration of things done badly, it occurs when you think you are unpunished."

The Swiss bank UBS sent a statement three days later denying the information: they did not have a client with that name, nor did the account number correspond to that of the bank.

The police, after allegedly leaking the document, reported it to the Prosecutor's Office, but the procedure was shelved.

The chief of staff of the deputy director of the police, José Ángel Fuentes Gago, traveled to Switzerland to find out why they had leaked false information.

Without results.

Trias denounced

, but lost.

"The judge said that the journalists were not to blame because the source was solvent, it was the Ministry of the Interior."

A "serious and reliable" source, says the ruling.

He filed another complaint after the Fernández Díaz recordings came out, but it was not accepted because the recording was illegal.

“It seems incredible that in a State of Law this is done.

They say: 'We're going to finish off this man', they got what they wanted, and nothing happens, ”he laments.

7. Informative weapons of political destruction against Podemos (January 2016).

In the general elections of December 2015, Podemos obtained 69 deputies and became the third political force.

Their votes could prevent a new PP government.

Days later, the chief operating officer of the police, Eugenio Pino, as faithful to the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, as he is to Mariano Rajoy, orders his trusted agents to send the Court of Accounts a lethal report on Pablo Iglesias and Podemos.

It is a report without a signature or clear authorship, made quickly and in a rush, which is published by

only 23 days after the elections

.

The digital medium ensures that a police document shows that the Government of Iran has financed the political career of the Podemos leader.

The Clean Hands union relies on the document, for which no one is responsible, to file a complaint.

It is filed.

Weeks later, the police take over the document and file a complaint with the Court of Accounts.

It is also filed.

"I spoke several times with Fernández Díaz," Pablo Iglesias now says, "and he always assured me that he had nothing to do with it."

He wasn't going to say 'yes, yes, I sent some guys to blow you up'.

One of the main characteristics of the report they made against me is how shabby it was.

It did not even serve for the most willful judge to take it into account.

Their purpose was not to put me in jail, because they had not obtained evidence of anything illegal.

The so-called PISA report [Pablo Iglesias SA] was destined to feed the media to tabloids and even supposedly respectable media to install a lie in the environment: the illegal financing of Podemos.

Iglesias has an impact on the media aspect of the police operation of which he was a victim: “Villarejo manufactures a media power.

This policeman is what he is because of his contacts with the media and it is unacceptable that it is beginning to normalize to say 'the job of a journalist is to have dinner with guys like Villarejo'.

I believe that when that begins it is the beginning of the end of democracy ”.

The campaign was not only against Iglesias.

Juan Carlos Monedero, another of the leaders of Podemos, recalls that he also suffered the consequences of the same strategy: “False reports prepared by the State apparatus and filtered to certain media to create the social construction that you are a criminal.

I had 12 complaints and for three days the journalists stationed in front of my house spent 24 hours.

In the end the complaints are filed, but it does not matter, they have already made people think that you are a criminal.

This is what Umberto Eco says about the mud machine with the phrase: a judge in red socks smoking alone in a park.

There is nothing illegal, but there is something suspicious… It was very strong.

They generate a very hostile environment in which they point to you as if you were public enemy number one.

And all you had done was found a party that could harm them.

Yes, there was a time when they managed to scare me. "

8. A “new life” for a former Venezuelan minister in exchange for evidence against Iglesias (April 2016).

The first week of April 2016,

and

published that Venezuela paid seven million to Pablo Iglesias, Juan Carlos Monedero and Jorge Verstrynge.

The latter remembers that he did not give it importance, but then he became concerned: “One from Intelligence told me that they were after Pablo.

He said they would go deep, that they were going to kill him, metaphorically.

I warned him.

He expected it ”.

The news was based on an alleged document signed by Rafael Isea, Hugo Chávez's former finance minister.

Three agents of the National Police traveled to New York days later to meet with Isea and to guarantee the authenticity of the document.

The appointment was at the Consulate of Spain and the police, who assured that they represented the Spanish Government, promised to remove Isea's family from Venezuela and offer her "a new life" in exchange for her testimony against Podemos.

The police officer Fuentes Gago even told him: "If you help us to prevent the Podemos from arriving, screw up the sea, better for everyone."

The ex-minister of Chávez agreed despite the fact that he saw strange things in the document: "I don't usually write that way, neither does the name fit me, nor the dates, and he never used Chávez's second surname," he says.

A month later, his statement appeared with names and surnames in the newspaper

, but the promises disappeared.

Rafael Isea agreed in June 2019 to tell the story to EL PAÍS: “They manipulated me with something very delicate, they put my family at risk.

I was under severe pressure for several months, awaiting the reaction of the Venezuelan government.

That is why he had not spoken until now.

We are talking about lives.

We are talking about an 80-year-old lady that I can't even see.

I trusted a government that told me I could get my mother out of there. "

She never heard from the Fernández Díaz police officers again.

9. A false money order in the Grenadines (May 2016).

The police leaked to

in May 2016 a payment order for $ 272,325 (229,000 euros) by the Venezuelan Government in favor of Pablo Iglesias at a branch of the Euro Pacific Bank in the Grenadine Islands.

The payment date, March 11, 2014, coincided with the date on which Podemos was registered to attend the European elections on May 25, 2014. Venezuelan citizen Carlos Alberto Arias obtained a residence permit from the Spanish Ministry of the Interior for Collaborate with the police by providing documents on payments from the Venezuelan Executive to Podemos and Pablo Iglesias, as he himself declared.

The document was false, according to the Euro Pacific Bank.

10. A phone robbery leads to a smear campaign (June 2016).

Dina Bousselham, Pablo Iglesias' adviser in the European Parliament, denounced on November 1, 2015 that her phone had been stolen.

Two months later the card of his mobile where he stored sensitive information arrived at the

magazine

, supposedly in an anonymous envelope.

The card ended up in the hands of Villarejo, who asked the director of the magazine for it because, according to what he said, his heads of the Interior were interested.

The content stored on that card that could do the most damage to Iglesias — sexist comments about a journalist — appeared in

days after Villarejo, according to his schedule, met with journalists from that outlet.

The commissioner, in prison since 2017, is accused of these events and Iglesias continues in the case as injured.

"What really makes Villarejo great," Pablo Iglesias now says, "is that he is a professional in the media.

What we have experienced is not the ability of these sewers to fabricate false evidence, but rather their enormous capacity to fabricate false news.

Disregard for the truth has become the norm and not the exception.

I think that in media battles a logic of war has been imposed, in which anything goes, in which the objective of the headline, of the topic of conversation, is never to focus on the truth or to focus on the facts in a certain way, but to make the war the adversary.

And that leaves our democracy in a very vulnerable situation.

Vice President Iglesias, on the Interior sewers

- “There is a dimension, the most evident of the

which is the institutional dimension: the Ministry of the Interior working at full capacity not to protect the public good but to serve the PP, in two senses.

On the one hand, trying to cover up the corruption of the PP, even putting pressure on the judges.

And, on the other hand, discrediting his political opponents. ”.-“ This is where the next dimension of the sewer appears, which for me is the most important.

What is the media dimension.

One of the main characteristics of the so-called PISA report [Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima] is how shabby it is.

A set of press clippings, of assumptions ... They tried to investigate, they sent policemen abroad to see if they found something, but they found nothing, and they built a report that has primarily a media purpose.

And there it is enormously effective. ".-" The illegal financing of Podemos is a lie, but it is installed, and it gives material to all the media adversaries of Podemos, to the entire right, regardless of whether it does not have any judicial path, it is Media dynamite, it serves to install a story ".-" It seems that in Spain it is free to defame and lie and that is a characteristic of the present.

We have not stopped being accused of serious crimes at any time, at any time during all these years.

And that logically has had electoral effects and reputational effects, and at the same time that contrasts with the judicial decisions: all the cases have been archived ".-" I believe that one of the main consequences of what Villarejo represents is that the trust in the media is in the worst moment in history in our country ".-" Politics has always been very tough in Spain but I believe that what has been done and what is done with us, that has not been done never.

And of course, that can kill anyone.

We are all human beings ".-" The judges will have to determine the criminal responsibilities that Fernández Díaz may have.

What seems clear is that he was the Minister of the Interior and that the decisions that were made came from the department he headed.

From then on, I don't know what is worse, that he knew it or that he did not know it.

With regard to political responsibility it is evident.

He was the head of the Ministry of the Interior whose role organizing and giving instructions to the sewer is being accredited.