Eduardo Inda and the publishing company of Okdiario They violated the right to honor of the former Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias through a bank located in the tax haven of the Grenadine Islands, news to which that digital medium dedicated several publications but which turned out to be false. The Supreme Court has now sentenced the director and editor of that digital media, Dos Mil Palabras SL, to compensate Iglesias with 18,000 euros and to publish a note that “summarizes” the main arguments of the sentence handed down by the Civil Chamber. Okdiario will also have to prevent the dissemination of these articles on the Internet and ensure that they cannot be accessed through search engines online.
The falsehoods spread by Okdiario against the former leader of Podemos of the Interior perpetrated between 2012 and 2017 against the political adversaries of Mariano Rajoy’s Government – among them Podemos and the Catalan independence parties – and which the then active commissioner José Manuel Villarejo recorded in dozens of recordings.
The articles against Iglesias for which he has been condemned OKdiary They were published on May 6, 7 and 8, 2016 and were disseminated by Inda in interventions on television and through her Twitter and Facebook accounts. The events, according to that medium, had been committed in 2014, just two months after Podemos registered in the registry of political parties. The first news item, under the title “The Maduro government paid $272,000 to Pablo Iglesias in the Grenadines tax haven in 2014,” indicated that the payments were camouflaged as a payment for consultancies for the social development of Venezuela and that the account in which the payment was made, located in a tax haven, belonged to Iglesias, although they referred to him in code as “Santa María”, his mother’s second surname.
Okdiario He claimed to have had access to the payment order issued by the Venezuelan authorities and that the Spanish police had requested additional information to certify that this account belonged to the then leader of Podemos. The news was illustrated with a supposed copy of the payment order. The publications continued in the following days with information such as that the Spanish authorities confirmed that the payment documents to Iglesias were “authentic.”
Iglesias took Inda and the publishing company to court, but a court of first instance and, later, the Provincial Court of Madrid dismissed the lawsuit. The lawyer Marta Flor Núñez appealed to the Supreme Court and the Civil Court has now agreed with her. In the ruling, for which Judge Rafael Sarazá was the rapporteur, the court explains that what has been analyzed is the conflict between Iglesias’ right to honor and the freedoms of information and expression under which his actions are protected by Inda and Okdiario. The magistrates point out that the articles that are the subject of the lawsuit (two pieces of information and one opinion forum) dealt with a matter of general interest – the payment by a foreign State, whose policy is questioned for non-compliance with democratic standards, of a large amount to the leader of a political party and candidate for general elections, in the account of a bank located in a tax haven. And, these articles, adds the Supreme Court, did not contain “unjustified” offensive qualifiers, which is another of the requirements for freedom of information to take precedence over the right to honor.
“The controversy centers on the requirement of truthfulness,” warns the court, which focuses on the fact that the text written by the journalist who signed that news, Francisco Mercado, was very different from the one that was finally published by order of the director. “The content of the newspaper article that he wrote reported not on the existence of the payment but on the existence of the police investigation into such payment, and he used caution when making statements about the circumstances of such payments, such as the use of qualifiers such as ‘alleged’, ‘alleged’, etc.”, states the ruling, which explains that Inda “ordered the article to be modified, changed the headline, which became an apodictic statement about the existence of such payment in a tax haven, eliminated the other precautions used by the journalist and reprimanded the journalist for the terms in which he had written the article.”
The court warns that the news about Venezuela’s payment to Iglesias “must be put in relation” to the news published the following day about the alleged endorsement by the Spanish authorities of the authenticity of the payment documents to the then leader of Podemos. “With said article, the news outlet confirmed the seriousness of its sources,” the magistrates emphasize, who warn that from the statements of the former deputy operational director of the police, Eugenio Pino, who testified as a witness in this case and whose “environment” was cited by those responsible for Okdiario as its main “source”, it follows that what was stated in that article “was not true.” “The witness declared that the police investigation was embryonic and that he did not even send those documents to the scientific police because they were mere photocopies, which made it impossible to verify their authenticity,” the ruling states.
The magistrates consider that the information was not truthful because, as it was definitively published, “it was not based on verified data from objective and reliable sources.” “For this reason, the violation of the plaintiff’s right to honor cannot be considered legitimized by the legitimate exercise of freedom of information,” concludes the Supreme Court.
