The Plenary Chamber of the Supreme Court operates as if it were a tennis court. The central place, that of the network, is occupied by the witness; On one side of these are the defenses and the accused; to the other, the accusations. The seven magistrates of the court are located in front of the appearing parties, between the two sides of the court, like the court judge. And from there they continue the session, intervening as little as possible. When the interrogation picks up pace or the defenses and accusations get into a discussion, some judges, like the former president of the Criminal Chamber Manuel Marchena, move their heads from side to side as if trying to follow the ball. In the fourth session of the trial, held this Monday, there was a lot of that.
The Supreme Court between the accusations and the defenses that have forced Andrés Martínez Arrieta, the president of the court and court judge, to intervene more than ever. Between debate and debate, Koldo García’s ex-wife, Patricia Uriz, who is accused in the part of the case being investigated by the National Court, has tried to justify the cash that the Civil Guard found in her house and has refused to recognize as hers the messages intercepted between her and her then husband in which they spoke of “chistorras”, “soles” and “lettuces”, terms that investigators believe were used in code to refer to bills of different values.
Uriz is accused in the part of the case that is being heard in the National Court and has only agreed to answer the questions of her lawyer, Leticia de la Hoz, the same one who assists Koldo García in the trial. This interrogation agreed between defense and witness has been one of the sources of differences between the parties that have tense the session, together with frequent interventions by the president of the Chamber, who expressed doubts about the relevance of De la Hoz’s questions about Uriz’s assets. “Who are you defending here, Koldo or Patricia?” Arrieta asked on one occasion. “The UCO says that there is confusion in the assets of Koldo García with that of Mrs. Patricia,” the lawyer alleged, who intended to demonstrate that the increase in assets attributed by the Civil Guard is not such, because many of their assets were prior to the period under investigation and others are the normal assets of a couple that earned more than 125,000 euros per year.
The Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard believes that Uriz and Koldo García were guarding the bribe money that they and Ábalos received from the businessmen of the plot. Agents link those funds to around 24,000 euros in cash. They found this money in a gun rack in the couple’s home and also intercepted conversations about the transfer of funds between them and the then minister on García’s phones. Uriz has denied that he managed money of irregular origin. Of the 24,000 euros in cash found in the gunsmith, he assured, 13,000 were his, saved for years, and 11,000 were funds that the couple had for unexpected needs. “For repairs and other things,” he explained.
The rest of the cash they handled when Koldo García was an advisor to the then minister and secretary of Organization of the PSOE came, above all, according to Uriz, from reimbursement of PSOE expenses. The woman, who worked in the secretariat of the Ministry of Transport during the Ábalos era, explained that García claimed expenses from the PSOE and the Ministry of Transport, so she worked with two envelopes: one to keep the invoices for the party’s expenses and another for those of the ministry. “Koldo gave the tickets to the Ministry’s secretariat and for Ferraz he made an Excel sheet and passed it to the party. I gave Ábalos’ personal expenses that we paid to Koldo and he managed them with Ábalos,” he said, before explaining that Transport usually reimbursed transfer expenses, with some exceptions, while Ferraz always paid in cash, but upon presentation of the ticket. “Koldo once lost a ticket and was left without cashing it. Ferraz was very rigid,” Uriz said.
Koldo García’s ex-wife has explained that she sometimes went to Ferraz to collect the envelopes with the reimbursement of expenses, but she gave them to Koldo and she did not know the money that was inside and it corresponded to the total amount of the invoices presented. Sometimes, they deposited the money into their accounts through an ATM so as not to have so much at home, said the witness, who has attributed the messages in the summary that indicate that she and her then-husband managed Ábalos money of supposed irregular origin to advances on the former minister’s daily expenses. “I went to buy tobacco, I took clothes to the dry cleaners, train tickets that I bought for the family, things from Amazon, books… I advanced them,” said Uriz, who has admitted that he bought a gift from the former socialist leader for his then partner, Jésica Rodríguez, or paid child support for one of Ábalos’ children because the minister’s then wife did not want him to attend to the needs of children who were not hers.
There was expectation to hear Uriz’s explanations about the messages incorporated into the case in which Ábalos’ former advisor and his then partner spoke of accounts “a” and “b” or referred to deliveries of “chistorras” or “lettuces.” His lawyer has not asked him about it, but, at the end of the interrogation, Alberto Durán, lawyer for the popular accusation, who heads the PP, has asked the president to ask him. “I don’t remember those WhatsApps. If I had been able to access the devices, I could say something,” the witness alleged, instructed in the insistent claim that her lawyer has been making to the Supreme Court to have them hand over the devices that were used on the accused the day they were arrested and their homes were searched.
