December 2019. A lawyer, José Manuel Calvente, goes to a Civil Guard barracks to denounce a series of accounting irregularities by the political party which has just fired him. Podemos, which at the time was negotiating its entry into government with the PSOE, saw how a court in Madrid opened a judicial matryoshka called the Neurona case that continued to grow until, three years later , it is archived. Magistrate Juan José Escalonilla, identified by Podemos as the architect of an acute episode of “war of laws”, ruled on the dismissal of a case which was compared to the Gürtel plot, fueled by police reports dubious and which fueled the bonfire that the media and right-wing parties created following the opening of the debates.
Calvente went to the Civil Guard after being fired by Podemos with accusations of sexual harassment against a colleague that could never be proven. There, he began crafting a narrative combining his knowledge as coordinator of the party’s legal team with input from colleagues who he said did not want to go testify for fear of reprisals. His words reached Court 42 in Madrid’s Plaza de Castilla, where he fired bombs and admitted that many of his accusations were based on “rumor.”
Calvente Darts was a tough offering to beat. He attributed the classic menu of corruption to a party that based its existence on the idea of renewing institutions and putting an end, precisely, to corruption: illegal financing, bonuses, false invoices, internal omerta and even a “ box B” within the party. then led by Pablo Iglesias, recently appointed vice-president of the government.
Escalonilla’s first car didn’t invite us to think about a macro cause. He launched the “essential” procedures, he said then, to see what was behind all this. The press and conservative analysts, under the leadership of the whistleblower himself, were unable to resist: “the Gürtel of Podemos” was born, in the courts and on the front pages of the newspapers. It took Vox less than a week to get it featured as a popular accusation.
A “worse” case than Gurtel o Filesa would have involved, among other things, the rigging of contract awards and works in public administrations worth several hundred million euros or the irregular financing of party campaigns with black money. In the present case of Neurona, the quantities did not bear comparison but the marketing of spare parts did its job, even if all, little by little and over three years, were archived.
The one called “case B” of Podemos, which investigated irregularities in the management of the Solidarity Fund, was archived. Former senator Celia Cánovas denounced opaque outflows of money from this fund to an association: “There is no proof of the existence of an embezzlement,” declared the Madrid court. Nor was there a crime in the reform of the party headquarters, an issue for which the PP was sanctioned in its Gürtel plot: there was no “misappropriation of money” for ” payments and work unrelated” to the reform, said the judge.
Finally, the salary supplements did not constitute irregular bonuses granted to senior party officials. The donations made to the Impulsa project were not criminal because Podemos accredited the destination to which the money was donated. The contracts with Portuguese consultancy ADB Europa were consulting contracts and not documents demonstrating an “alleged global network of political corruption,” as Calvente said.
The party, indicted for three years
The first accusations and accusations fell like a bomb when Podemos had been part of the coalition government for six months. The party itself was accused as a legal entity, an honor that until then only the PP had had, but not for corruption but for the destruction of Bárcenas’ computers. With Podemos, Juanma del Olmo (communication secretary), Daniel de Frutos (treasurer), Rocío Val (manager), Carlos García (administrator) and Elías Castejón (Neurona) were brought to the timeless bench.
The prosecution, according to the documents, played a dual role, demanding that certain procedures be archived and suggesting that it would have no problem with others even going to trial. The various spare parts, before their respective files, were supplied by the reports of the Economic and Fiscal Delinquency Unit (UDEF) of the National Police which cemented the assertions, now unproven, inside and outside outside the court.
Vox, for its part, launched accusations against Podemos in the Plaza de Castilla which were of no use to the anti-corruption prosecution. He also gave free rein to the criminal offensive against his political rivals that he had developed during the process, the pandemic and now against the nomination negotiations. Those of Santiago Abascal even tried to combine their two favorite causes and requested, without success, that Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal testify in the Neurona affair. If the investigation progressed, it was a success, and if it did not progress, for the people of Abascal, it was proof of the existence of a “mafia”. The PP of Pablo Casado even accused Pablo Iglesias of having gone to Bolivia to obtain privileged information on the affair.
New rooms were opened and closed, leaving behind a trail of police reports and unproven accusations. Juan Carlos Monederofounder of the party, was even accused by the UDEF of having collected a “false” invoice from Neurona which, according to the court, was true. He was charged for two years and seven months. Several aides to then-Equalities Minister Irene Montero were tasked with investigating whether they misappropriated public funds by restraining and caring for their children at specific times.
Judge Escalonilla took 15 months to decide that it was not a crime, closing a “nanny case” for which another magistrate even wrote to Congress to warn Montero, who can only be charged by the Supreme Court, that proceedings were opened.
The last fringe: the Neurona case
One by one, the pieces of the Neurona case fell into the file and only one moved forward: the one that gave its name to the case. Judge Escalonilla wanted to know if Podemos had paid bonuses to this Mexican consulting company for political communications work during the 2019 elections which, in reality, had not even been carried out. A case that was dismantled in stages. Juanma del Olmo was the first to affirm before the judge that this work had been carried out. It was November 2020.
The police questioned the party’s defensive arguments but, ultimately, the judge understood that these works had indeed existed and that all that remained was to find out whether there was also overcharging which could lead to a crime. electoral. An expert report that no one wanted to produce until Aleix Sanmartín proposed it, with an analysis that left Judge Escalonilla no other way out: the work was even paid below the market price. Along the way, the judge also filed a complaint against Podemos with an argument that had to wait more than three years: the party, as a legal entity, could not be accused of electoral crime.
His latest order, the one that closed the last piece of the Neurona case, is not for everyone. “It is possible to conclude on the basis of the above that there is no evidence indicating that the money from the electoral account from which the amount of the said contract was paid was diverted for purposes other than those envisaged in the LOREG.” There is therefore neither embezzlement of electoral funds nor electoral crime.
Three years later, the Macro case, compared to Gürtel or Filesa, has not even gone to trial, after the plaintiff himself admitted that many of his accusations were based on “rumor”. Ultimately, this is an investigation through which Podemos holds, for the moment, the national record of criminal charges brought against a political party for its finances. Only the PP is ahead, not because of Gürtel, the real one, in which it was held responsible for the profits, but because it was unsuccessfully accused of having destroyed Luis Bárcenas’ computers.
