The Supreme Court ordered journalist Eduardo Inda and his media OkDiario to compensate Pablo Iglesias 18,000 euros for publishing the hoax in 2016 according to which he had a hidden account in the tax haven of the Grenadines. The judges of the Civil Chamber consider that it was Inda himself who modified the information of a publisher to confirm the existence of this account with hundreds of thousands of euros but, in reality, “the information was not true” because “it was not based on verified data from objective and reliable sources”. Inda and her newspaper must publish their condemnation on their social networks.
The deception over the money that the former Podemos leader held in an account in the Grenadines was one of those launched against Iglesias and his entourage a month before the 2016 general elections, when polls brought the party closer to the results of the PSOE. Under the headline “Maduro’s government paid $272,000 to Pablo Iglesias in the Grenadines tax haven in 2014,” Inda’s website revealed a purported bank document and said the money arrived from Venezuela to Iglesias’ account in the Grenadines two months after the party was founded.
The digital newspaper, a day later, reinforced its information with another article which declared: “Spanish authorities prove that the payment documents to Pablo Iglesias are authentic.” The reality is that this bank account did not exist and that this document, supposedly of police origin, was never verified and was not even pursued by the police themselves.
The lawsuit took almost a decade to be resolved by the Supreme Court, with a financial judgment of 18,000 euros against Eduardo Inda and his digital company, thus exonerating the editor-in-chief of the newspaper. His treatment overlapped with the criminal proceedings brought by Pablo Iglesias against the journalist and this civil case remained paralyzed until deliberations resumed a few weeks ago.
The Supreme Court concludes that there is the main evidence to convict Inda and OkDiario: the statement of Francisco Mercado, the journalist who signed this information and whose testimony was decisive in obtaining a conviction. He explained to the courts that his initial information was limited to stating that the police were investigating whether this account existed in the Grenadines, and that it was Inda who had manipulated the text to eventually state that the account was real and that the police had confirmed the veracity of the evidence.
The reality, apart from the fact that the story did not exist, is that the police did not have the slightest proof of the veracity of these documents, as recognized by Eugenio Pino himself, former Deputy Operational Director (DAO) of the National Police and already convicted of illegal maneuvers of force in the case against the Pujols, in addition to awaiting trial in the Kitchen case and accused in the case of the dirty police war against Podemos.
“The information was not true because, as it was definitively published, it was not based on verified data from objective and reliable sources,” affirmed the Supreme Court a few months after the publication of the hoax. It was Eduardo Inda, the court declared, who manipulated this information and he and the newspaper must answer financially for the hoax: compensation of 18,000 euros for Iglesias in addition to the obligation to delete the false information and to disseminate his conviction both in the media and on his social networks.
“We knew it was a lie”
The Supreme Court notes that the deception comes at a delicate political moment for Podemos and for the candidacy then led by Iglesias for Moncloa, the polls giving him the best historical result: “They were published only a few weeks before the general elections in which the plaintiff was leading the candidacy of his political party. networks.”
The creation of this false bank document and its distribution in OkDiario is considered by Iglesias and Podemos as one of the first coordinated police sewer operations to harm the rise of the party in its first years of existence. “We knew it was a lie,” said Francisco Martínez, number two in the Interior with Mariano Rajoy, for example, during a conversation with businessman Javier Pérez Dolset. An overview of the hoax’s timeline details how the hoax originated within the Police and hit the headlines less than two months before the general election.
elDiario.es was the first media outlet to deny the existence of this false narrative in the Grenadines: before appearing on OkDiario, it had been broadcast, with slight modifications, by a Venezuelan journalist from Miami. The exclusivity had therefore been copied from YouTube. In a conversation recorded by Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, the police officer admitted to journalist Antonio García Ferreras that the document was a “bacalada”.
The creation of the hoax on the account in the Grenadines is one of the objects of the investigation that Judge Santiago Pedraz has been leading for months into the dirty police war against Podemos. An investigation in which, as revealed by elDiario.es, the magistrate obtained proof that the PP political brigade orchestrated the deception through an informative note. Which, a few weeks later, OkDiario ended up publishing a month before the elections in which Podemos sought to overthrow the PSOE.
About The Author
