Villarejo detailed the false assembly of the Iglesias account in a tax haven

06:15

The secret audios of corruption: chapter 9

The digital

published on May 6, 2016 an alleged corruption scandal against Pablo Iglesias.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the news, paid $272,325 to the leader of Podemos through a bank located in the tax haven of the Grenadine Islands.

He allegedly did so in March 2014, just two months after Podemos was registered in the registry of political parties and began an electoral race that led him in December 2015 to win 69 seats in the Congress of Deputies and be key to the investment.

All the documentation that accredited the scandal against Pablo Iglesias turned out to be false.

That exclusive was broadcast on La Sexta through an interview between the director of

, Antonio García Ferreras, and the director of

Eduardo Inda.

The leader of Podemos, a victim of information intoxication, appeared on the same television program denying the information.

Eleven days after those events, the commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, still active, met for lunch with the president of

and assistant to the presidency of Atresmedia, Mauricio Casals, and with the journalist Antonio García Ferreras.

Villarejo recorded the meeting in his diary.

At that lunch, recorded like many others by Villarejo, the commissioner informed the businessman and the journalist about some crude set-ups by the Ministry of the Interior to discredit Podemos or the Catalan independentistas.

What follows summarizes part of that conversation, advanced by

Libre, in which they refer to the information released 11 days earlier, first in OK Diario and then in La Sexta.

Although Podemos filed a complaint against this false information that was published in several media outlets, the judge filed the complaint and endorsed the work of the journalists.

'modus operandi'

What happened with that information of police origin that ended up being leaked to a certain media outlet in May 2016 was similar to what, since 2012, when the PP came to power, the Ministry of the Interior had been doing in relation to the adversaries government politicians.

The

of the so-called patriotic police was always the same.

First, they prepared written reports, most without seal or signature, with incriminating evidence against certain political leaders or parties, much of it false or poorly verified, and even before turning it into complaints before the courts, they were leaked to certain media outlets.

This system, uncovered by some judicial investigations and now accredited by the recordings made by Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo with political leaders or journalists, was used several times with Catalan independentists and with leaders of Podemos.

Pablo Iglesias: "Impunity is absolute" Antonio García Ferreras: "We have never given information knowing that it was false. Never"

JMR

Pablo Iglesias maintains that the day the news broke about his account in a tax haven, the journalist Antonio García Ferreras called him to tell him to give his version.

“And I told him: 'Antonio is a lie, that's false.'

And he said: 'Well, Inda assures me that it's true and what I've decided is to give you the floor to give your version'.

And of course, I gave it, but one thing is that I imagined that that thing was garbage and another thing is that he said that in a conversation and what he was telling is that he releases news knowing that it is false a month before the elections general”, Iglesias declared this Sunday to EL PAÍS. 

Sources from La Sexta pointed out that it is "absolutely false" that this information was offered, knowing that it was a lie because it was spread before García Ferreras' meeting with Villarejo.

The chain reported a day after Inda reported the alleged scandal that the bank of the Grenadine Islands, to which

alluded, had denied the existence of that account.

"I have met with Villarejo three times," Ferreras himself assured this Monday during the broadcast of his program

.

"That audio is from the first of the meetings, when I met with him the news had already come out and we had already told it," he insisted.

"We have never given information knowing that it was false, never. We had to meet with him to find out what he thought because that report was held by the police," he justified.

"We had doubts about that information but the police had it," he explained.

According to Ferreras, after meeting with Villarejo, he met Pablo Iglesias and told him everything.

"Podemos is lying and is doing something very similar to all the media that accused us of creating Podemos," said the presenter of La Sexta.

"We never entered the veto of Podemos and we never gave credibility to the Pisa report as many other media did."

"When we finally found out that the account was not real, it is clear that we said that we should not have given anything at all," he continued.

"But we didn't know that then."

Iglesias on Sunday harshly accused the journalist: “I think it is serious enough that he would never exercise that profession again.

Regardless of whether that can have a criminal route or not, but how it leaves the image of journalism in Spain is very serious, because it reveals something that is the key to the sewers and that is that they have never demonstrated until now the ability to put together a dossier that can have legal consequences.

They have never even managed to charge me, and most of the information that has been given is so crude that not even, even if a judge is encouraged to search, it is not very easy to put together a criminal case with press clippings.

Podemos denounced this false information in court, but it was archived.

“The impunity is absolute.

There I have hardly any hope that it will go anywhere.

The case of this Grenadines account that the judge filed, understanding that the news was false, but that it could be true as long as it was based on reports... The key to this was actually media.

If this conditions the rundowns of the main gatherings, conversations on the radio or on television, this has an effect of wearing down and losing prestige, and this logically has an electoral effect, and this reveals a democratic problem in Spain, which has a judicial dimension, which has a government dimension, but in reality the really important one is the media, which is the only one that can condition the state of opinion of millions of citizens”, 

Sources from La Sexta have denied Iglesias's accusation: "Anyone who remembers what La Sexta was broadcasting in those years knows perfectly well that this television station never entered the veto against Podemos or the smear campaigns against them."