Podemos denounces a "judicial hunt" after deflating the last three cases against the party

The current Secretary General of Podemos and Minister of Social Rights, Ione Belarra, together with the former leader of the party, Pablo Iglesias, in an act in October 2021. Chema Moya (EFE)

Podemos has launched this Monday on the counterattack.

After learning that the Criminal Chamber of the National Court ordered the investigating judge Manuel García-Castellón to file the investigation into the alleged irregular financing of the party —reopened based on the testimony of Hugo Armando Carvajal,

, head of Venezuelan counterintelligence until 2014 —, the spokesman for the formation in Congress, Pablo Echenique, has accused the magistrate of undertaking a “judicial hunt”.

A few words that come after the

Y

the

was terminated after finding no evidence against Pablo Iglesias, former secretary general of the formation.

More information

The National Court archives the investigation for the alleged irregular financing of Podemos based on the testimony of Pollo Carvajal

The left-wing party, currently led by Ione Belarra, thus affects a thesis that it has been repeating for years: the existence of a smear "campaign" against its members, which includes police and judicial bodies.

It is what the formation calls

or “legal warfare”: “

is the new coup.

It is a set of devices where media powers, connected to the economic ones, join forces with judicial authorities to illegitimately win in the courts what they could not win at the polls,” Iglesias said last year in an act with Lula da Silva, former president. of Brazil, who was imprisoned for sentences that ended up annulled.

This Monday, García-Castellón agreed to file the investigation into the alleged irregular financing of the political force and decreed to paralyze all the investigations that he had commissioned from the Police.

The magistrate, who reopened these investigations in October 2021 after five years closed, has been forced to make this decision after receiving the order of the Criminal Chamber of the Court itself, which upheld an appeal filed by the Prosecutor's Office when considering prospective this instruction, according to legal sources.

The magistrate had resumed the case after taking a statement from Pollo Carvajal, arrested in September of last year and immersed in an extradition process to the United States. The military officer attributed to former charges of the formation the collection of payments from Chavista governments and pointed to Juan Carlos Monedero, founder of Podemos;

the former deputy Carolina Bescansa, and the sociologists Jorge Lago and Ariel Jerez.

In order to investigate this, the judge included that testimony in a summary that the instructor Alejandro Abascal had shelved in 2016, which began after receiving a complaint against the party based on "a disorderly set of reproductions of news published in the press." and supported by an alleged police report, baptized as

(acronym for Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima), which did not bear the seal of any unit of the Corps.

This Pisa Report was endorsed by the Ministry of the Interior in the stage of Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP), when the so-called

operated , and served as the basis for the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) to take the case to the Court of Accounts, which considered it irrelevant.

The attacks against the judge

The decisions of García-Castellón, who also instructed the

, have put him on the target of Podemos.

“A judge friend told me that it is evident that the García-Castellón thing is prevarication.

He also explained to me that they will never convict him, ”says Pablo Iglesias in his memoir

, referring to the investigations opened for the theft of the mobile phone in 2015 of one of his advisers, Dina Bousselham, whose content was found copied in house of commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and also ended up published in various media.

The magistrate of the National Court opened an investigation in 2019 to find out if Villarejo had committed a crime of revealing secrets by leaking that information to journalists or even if he was behind an alleged operation to steal the mobile.

But the judge turned that thesis in 2020 and considered that Iglesias had deceived him to present himself as a victim.

García-Castellón then requested that he be charged with the Supreme Court, which rejected it for lack of evidence before returning the case to him, which he finally terminated this January after finding no evidence against the former leader of Podemos.

“Who turned an investigation into the espionage of Podemos into a failed attempt to charge me when I became vice president?” Iglesias returned to the charge this June.

A series of accusations that have led the Madrid Prosecutor's Office to open proceedings to study whether the former politician committed a crime of libel and slander against Judge García-Castellón.

Although, this same Monday, Monedero insisted in the same direction after knowing the file of the case on the alleged irregular financing: "The Spanish justice is very prudent and, just before European authorities can open a process for prevarication and Spain loses points in the assessment of their democracy, they order a stop.

If the CGPJ [General Council of the Judiciary] worked... 'They call it democracy', we sang”.

Podemos also includes in its theory on

the final prison sentences of its spokesperson Isabel Serra and former deputy Alberto Rodríguez for assaulting police officers.

And the

, a case where the party remains charged as a legal entity and which was opened in the summer of 2020 to investigate whether the formation hired the Mexican consultant Neurona for the general elections of April 2019 and paid it more than 360,000 euros for some projects that were never carried out.

In these investigations, which the Prosecutor's Office has deflated, seven lines of investigation were opened, of which six have been shelved - in addition to giving the green light to three other derived investigations, such as the

, of which two have already been archived—.

The instructor ruled out, for example, the alleged bonuses to party officials, the diversion of money from the Solidarity Fund or the irregularities in the reform of the Podemos headquarters.

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