Former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero intensifies his defense strategy in the National Court, where the investigating judge José Luis Calama. The lawyer of the former leader of the PSOE, Víctor Manuel Moreno Catena, has submitted a letter to the magistrate asking him to declare the “general nullity” of the investigation and to exclude from the procedure “all the evidence obtained” by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. The lawyer considers that several rights of the former head of the Government have been violated and that different “illicitly analyzed” evidence has been incorporated into the summary. Calama must rule on this request in the coming days or weeks, although it does not have a set deadline to respond. Furthermore, its decision may be appealed.
In the letter sent to the magistrate, the socialist’s defense lists several rights that it considers violated: to the ordinary judge predetermined by the Law; to a fair process with all guarantees; to effective judicial protection; to the presumption of innocence; to intimacy; to data protection; and the secrecy of third party communications. Among other arguments, the defense lawyer questions that the Court of Instruction 15 of Madrid, which investigated the public rescue of the airline Plus Ultra in a pandemic in 2021, could take on a derivative in 2025 on a possible crime of money laundering committed by the company’s leadership and then refer it in 2026 to the Central Court of Instruction 2 of the National Court when the figure of Rodríguez Zapatero emerged.
“What the Court of Instruction 15 assumed is, simply, the jurisdiction to hear a new complaint [de la Fiscalía] for facts other than those already investigated,” says Moreno Catena, professor of Procedural Law. “This assumption of jurisdiction did not conform to the law, nor should a separate piece have been formed. The complaint should have been sent to distribution and not remotely directed,” emphasizes the former president’s lawyer.
The defense wants a dozen court decisions to be annulled. Among others, the ruling of November 2025 to open a line of investigation into this alleged money laundering after the rescue of Plus Ultra; the entry and search orders at the airline’s headquarters, executed last December; the decision to send the case to the National Court; the records in Zapatero’s office and in his daughters’ company; the partial blocking of the former president’s accounts; and creating a separate piece about the jewelry found in his office safe.
