Justice has definitively buried the accusations of illegal financing which weighed on Podemos in the context of the Neurona affair. The Provincial Court of Madrid rejected the last appeal by which Vox challenged the decisions of judge Juan José Escalonilla which led to the closure of the trial. A case in which the magistrate investigated the party’s accounts and even held the party itself accused of several senior officials, employees and founders like Juan Carlos Monedero or Juanma del Olmo.
The case, which began after the complaint of former party lawyer José Manuel Calvente, investigated in half a dozen separate documents whether Podemos was irregularly financed, made illegal payments to the consulting firm Mexican Neurona or even if he had “B cash”, illegal bonuses or a criminal scheme for officials to take care of the babies of Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero. Also if Juan Carlos Monedero had used false invoices to enrich himself.
It took Judge Escalonilla three years to conclude that none of the crimes reported by Calvente existed and that, in his first statement, he had already admitted that part of his accusations were based on rumors and third-party statements, and to archive the case. Two months earlier, in September 2023, he had already issued an order excluding Podemos from the case. Vox’s allegations against all these decisions have just been rejected.
Podemos secretary general Ione Belarra stressed that the party had been under investigation for “false business” for years.
The far-right party notably demanded that further investigations be carried out to determine whether Podemos had overpaid Neurona Consulting for work carried out for the 2019 elections. Removing Podemos, which was even accused of being a political party, was ” inappropriate “. » for Vox. The judges go so far as to criticize Santiago Abascal’s party for having maintained this theory in its appeal while “the investigation of the case was rejected and therefore did not investigate the commission of an offense of irregular financing” , but rather on an electoral offense and documentary falsification which They were subsequently rejected.
Without it being a crime of illegal financing, the Court now declares that “the retention of the representative of the aforementioned political party as investigator was not appropriate since the investigation showed that he did not There were no criminal charges against him.
