The anti-corruption prosecution asked the judge of the National Court Santiago Pedraz to reject the complaint filed by the PP against the PSOE because it is based on a anonymous uncorroborated story for all data and in which they were detected Open contradictions with already established facts in another procedure, the “Koldo case”, which is currently being handled by Judge Ismael Moreno.
The report in which the anti-corruption prosecutor requests the inadmissibility of the complaint does not oppose the appearance of the PP as popular action in the “oil plot”, a conglomerate of hydrocarbon companies that allegedly defrauded the Treasury of more than 182 million euros in VAT, for which businessmen Víctor de Aldama and Claudio Rivas are in preventive detention.
But it rejects that the investigation must be extended to the facts and crimes indicated by the PP in its complaint: money laundering, bribery, influence peddling and illegal financing of the PSOE.
The prosecutor recalls that case law allows an investigation to be opened on the basis of anonymous complaints, but only when “the information is supported by corroborating data”established the Supreme Court.
In this case, the PP’s complaint is based exclusively on the publication in The objective from an interview with an unidentified person, according to which Claudio Rivas used Víctor de Aldama, close to former minister José Luis Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García, to obtain a government license as an operator of hydrocarbons for the Villafuel company. Aldama allegedly asked for 600,000 euros in exchange for his contacts within the government to facilitate obtaining this license.
Anticorruption considers that these accusations, based on an anonymous story, do not offer any element or principle of proof that reasonably supports their reality, and the PP limits itself to affirming its existence without any objective support.
In this regard, the same doctrine of the High Court indicated that “in general terms, the news in itself does not legitimize any popular actor to transform journalistic history into a history of punishable events. triggers of criminal proceedings.
The Criminal Chamber also indicated that “popular action cannot degrade the relevant role it is called upon to play in the criminal process”. limited to transforming the information into a criminal case.»
The report describes the complex administrative process put in place to obtain the wholesale petroleum products operator license. The company must meet a series of legal, technical and financial requirements, requiring that it have three million euros allocated to the activity.
You must then make a responsible declaration to the Ministry of Ecological Transition. The latter informs the National Markets and Competition Commission, but will not carry out this procedure if it detects that the required requirements are not met.
This process leads the prosecutor to question the assertions of the anonymous testimony concerning the intervention of the chief of staff of the Minister of Industry in the Villafuel permit, since the treatment corresponds to the Ministry of Ecological Transition and not to the Ministry of Industry.
On the other hand, UCO investigations in the “Koldo case” revealed that Aldama’s efforts to obtain the license for Villafuel lasted until the end of 2021, but that at that time, Ábalos and Koldo García was no longer there in the Uco ministry. Transports and Rivas himself reportedly asked Aldama that Koldo stop his intervention because it was counterproductive. It is thanks to another third party that management is referred to the competent body of the Ministry of Ecological Transition.
For the prosecutor, this is not credible that in February 2021, a meeting took place with the chief of staff of the Minister of Industry, even though it had already been made clear to those concerned that this was not the competent ministry.
Furthermore, the anonymous testimony dates the start of Villafuel’s licensing procedures in October 2020, while the evidence available in the trial of the “Koldo case” indicates that they began in December of the same year.
The prosecutor concludes that, in addition to the lack of corroboration of the anonymous testimony, it contradicts already established facts, which leads to invoking the pure and simple inadmissibility of PP’s complaint.
