Editorial: Plumbing for “ex-militants”

Investigated for the alleged crimes of prevarication, embezzlement, influence peddling and criminal organization, Leire Díez continues to be for the PSOE and La Moncloa a simple former grassroots activist, an unknown person, as for María Jesús Montero, the activity is “surprising” – she declared last Friday – … developed by Vicente Fernández, a man of her greatest confidence whom she put at the head of SEPI – because of the necessary visibility of Andalusian talent, added the first vice-president – ​​and whom she has not heard from “for six years”. It is the UCO which, these days and under the orders of Santiago Pedraz, is trying to clarify the web of data and contacts found in the computer devices seized during the operation deployed against Díez and Fernández, a police investigation that the National Court ordered to determine the scope and depth of a criminal conspiracy whose ramifications, still to be determined, go beyond the framework of political “plumbing” and, even more, of the journalistic investigation that Díez used as a pretext. to try to explain his adventures.

The “ex-militant” was much more than just a member. Not only did she have a direct line with Santos Cerdán, organizational secretary of the PSOE, but from 2018, after the arrival of Pedro Sánchez in La Moncloa, she was hired as director of public companies like Enusa and Correos, precisely when the postal company was chaired by Juan Manuel Serrano, a personal friend of the general director. The contacts agenda of the “militant” Díez was enviable and very fruitful, which did not prevent La Moncloa from using as a political firewall the supposed uselessness of someone who used blackmail and barter as working tools. As the investigation continues and the UCO expands the scope of action of the “plumber”, the government will have to modify its strategy and account for the extent to which the relationship with Ferraz was “anecdotal”, who, along with Javier Pérez Dolset, presented himself in society as an envoy of Cerdán, if not of Pedro Sánchez himself, to wage their particular dirty war.

The revelations published by ABC on the confidential file seized by the UCO in Leire Díez, hosted in a “cloud” managed by Dolset, highlight what the PSOE itself, inspired by Podemos, as in so many other issues, called “the sewers”. The former activist had collected sensitive information on Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, investigator of the Begoña Gómez case, as well as on various prosecutors and leaders of the PP and the PSOE itself, such as Óscar López and Antonio Hernando, linked to the search for information on the saunas of Sabiniano Gómez, the father-in-law of Pedro Sánchez. Thanks to the devices seized from Díez and Fernández, the UCO agents follow the trail of the money from the alleged bribes that the conspiracy of the former president of SEPI collected for the tenders of public contracts of public companies and the most diverse regional organizations, but it is the documentation collected by the “ex-militant” against the political and judicial rivals of Sánchez, managed by Dolset, which reveals the exact coincidence of the work journalistic investigation that Leire would have carried out. Díez with the particular interests of the President of the Government, another anecdote from an episode in which economic corruption borders on political blackmail, always with his back turned to an executive power surrounded by foreigners and professionals who now surprise him.