The former PSOE militant who is investigating them for alleged crimes of influence peddling and bribery who eliminates the recordings of the case. Díez indicated this Monday that he met twice with the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE Santos Cerdán in April 2024 and that he did so “as a journalist”, as confirmed by sources present in the statement. Pérez-Dolset has also pointed out that the current Secretary of State for Telecommunications Antonio Hernando attended one of the meetings. Both have denied knowing the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, personally, beyond Díez meeting him at a rally.
The head of the Investigative Court Number 9 of Madrid, Arturo Zamarriego, had summoned Díez and Pérez-Dolset since this morning to declare as the main suspects in a “continued and coordinated criminal action” to “gather compromised or irregular information” from the top leadership of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Civil Guard in order to “annul or squander” investigations in “relevant cases that affect politicians and businessmen,” as he stated in a ruling.
The statements, finally, have been extended into the afternoon because the magistrate has dedicated the morning to playing in court the audios that appear in the summary as evidence against his actions. Díez, who has been there for just over an hour, has stated that he only met with Cerdán twice on the dates in which the wife of the President of the Government was charged and
He has responded only to questions from the judge, the prosecutor and his lawyer and has specified that the meetings with Cerdán were arranged by journalist Patricia López —director of the digital Free Chronicle—, and consisted of informing the PSOE of some causes of which its members had been victims through the police and judicial sewers. Díez, who says that he took López’s witness in the journalistic investigations when she fell ill, framed his appointments with the socialist within others with different people to whom he passed information.
Dolset, who went on for more than two hours in his story, pointed out that the two meetings were very close together, lasting about 40 minutes each and that on the first occasion Hernando was also present. According to his version, an unknown person who knew the Villarejo case He had given him all the audios that the retired commissioner (José Manuel Villarejo) recorded over the years and Dolset then dedicated himself to contacting “victims” of espionage and giving them what he had obtained.
Sources around Antonio Hernando confirm that meeting. According to what they explain, the then deputy director of the Cabinet of the Presidency of the Government came because Santos Cerdán asked him to do so, due to his knowledge of the Villarejo case, as spokesperson for the Socialist Group in Congress when the PSOE promoted the first commission of inquiry into this matter. According to these sources, Hernando listened, did not speak at that meeting, which lasted about 20 minutes, and in which he concluded that the information offered by the participants was what was known and was prosecuted. That is the only occasion in which, according to Hernando’s entourage, he saw Leire Díez in all these years, reports Jose Marcos.
The former director of philately at the Post Office and former head of communications at Enusa has denied that she worked for the group led by Pedro Sánchez and has said that she had been affiliated for 20 years, but that she had no link with the party leadership. Both have cut off any attempt to link them to those recordings and have said that “they do not recognize each other.” In fact, they have submitted separate documents to remove the audios from the case.
About the photograph he published The Confidential in which Díez was seen entering the PSOE headquarters in Ferraz, the former militant explained that she came for just a few minutes to see a person she knew. He has also denied any relationship with Sánchez, whom he has only seen at “rallies” and with whom he took a photograph, already published by the press, at a campaign event in the auditorium of the University of Cantabria. There, in the municipality of Vega de Pas, Díez was deputy mayor.
She has assured that they have hacked the Google Drive that she shared with Dolset and in which they were storing information from their investigations. These facts have been brought to the attention of the police, said sources say. As he also intends to report in the coming days direct threats that he has suffered due to the leak of his telephone number and his home address.
The businessman has detailed the existence of a WhatsApp group shared by journalists and prosecutors in which information about different causes was leaked. The prosecutor in the case has tried to cut these questions from the interrogation because they have nothing to do with the purpose of the investigation, but Judge Zamarriego has allowed her to continue.
The nullity of the audios
The defense of both has requested early in the day the annulment of all the audios, in the meeting with the two, in which Díez presented himself as the “right-hand man” of the former secretary of the Socialist Organization Santos Cerdán.
Both were scheduled at 11:30, but it was not until noon when they entered the room. Magistrate Zamarriego has decided that they will enter together first to listen to the audios that appear in the proceedings, such as the three and a half hours of recording collected by Stampa from a meeting on May 7. to say that he is Cerdán’s “right hand man,” or that he is “the person that the PSOE has appointed” to investigate the malpractice of prosecutors and police. Finally, and after detecting difficulties in the sound, the magistrate has decided to send said audio so that it can be improved by the judicial police.
In the appeal filed by Leire Díez’s lawyer, to which EL PAÍS has had access, she points out that Stampa carried out an “extra-procedural and prospective investigation” violating the right of Díez and the businessman Pérez-Dolset to maintain the secrecy of communications. He explains that the prosecutor did not have a court order and that he undertook an investigation “without previously reporting the facts” after the meeting in the office of the former president of the construction company Sacyr Vallehermoso Luis del Rivero.
Díez requests to cancel a second recording, the one made in the office of Cerdán’s current lawyer, Jacobo Teijelo, last February. In it, Díez and Pérez-Dolset speak with a hydrocarbons businessman prosecuted in the National Court for fraud. if he gives him some information about the lieutenant colonel of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, among others: “I need Balas, okay? Just like that, I need Balas,” he said.
The defense alleges that in that case the “right to professional secrecy” and “confidentiality of communications” prevail because it was a meeting in a lawyer’s office. He points out that it is an “illegitimate interference” in the rights of all the people who were in that “private” meeting and that the purpose was to “devise a strategy” for some clients. The appeal explains that the media have fragmented that audio with “journalistic interest” and that, furthermore, none of the interlocutors consented to the recording.
Along the same lines, Pérez-Dolset’s defense has presented another brief requesting clarification as to why he has been summoned as an investigation when he had initially been called to testify as a witness. “From what has been done to date it appears that a prospective instruction is being carried out,” the appeal indicates. In his opinion, this is based on “press clippings,” and the meeting with Stampa, in which the businessman participated, does not involve criminal acts because he himself acknowledged that “they neither asked him for anything nor promised him anything,” he indicates. “Respect for freedom of the press and the right to information can never be translated, under penalty of shaking the foundations of the rule of law, into transferring the conclusions of press work to a criminal investigation,” he reflects.
