The Civil Guard arrested a third person, whose identity is not known, as part of the investigation in which the former socialist activist Leire Díez and the former president of the Spanish Company of Industrial Participations (SEPI) Vicente Fernández were also arrested, as sources from the Armed Institute confirmed to elDiario.es. The operation is still open and these three arrests took place on Wednesday.
The operation is the result of an investigation carried out by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which addressed the duty court of the National Court, number 6, to request several searches and arrests. Díez and Fernández are accused of crimes of fraud, falsification of documents, embezzlement, influence peddling and prevarication. At this time, the search continues, which continued throughout the night.
Fernández was president of SEPI between June 2018 and October 2019. He was dismissed from his position after the Seville Provincial Court reopened the case on the alleged rigging of the international tender for the award of the Aznalcóllar mine (Seville) and he was indicted again. Last week he was acquitted of this case, along with 15 other people, including various officials and technicians of the Junta de Andalucía.
Leire Díez, for her part, worked between October 2018 and December 2021 at Enusa, a public company in the nuclear sector dependent on SEPI. Socialist leaders claim that during this stage, Leire Díez attended some meetings of the public company with Vicente Fernández.
After his departure from SEPI, Vicente Fernández was registered between 2021 and 2023 in Servinabar, the Navarrese company suspected of being the link in the collection and distribution of bribes to the former secretary general of the PSOE Santos Cerdán, according to the Navarre Provincial Treasury. He never mentioned this position on his CV. He appeared before the Senate, as part of the commission of inquiry opened into this matter, and refused to answer questions because he was involved in another procedure linked to Aznalcóllar, reports Iker Rioja.
The case of the Aznalcóllar mine
Fernández Guerrero was accused by Judge Mercedes Alaya in the Aznalcóllar case for his role as secretary general of industry of the Junta de Andalucía, although at the time of leading the investigation against him he held the position of president of SEPI. Fernández resigned three days later, as announced by then-interim Finance Minister María Jesús Montero, now a socialist candidate for the board of directors.
The acquittal sentence handed down by the Seville court includes harsh criticism of Alaya’s instructions. This judge, known as the first investigator of the ERE affair, was one of Leire Díez’s targets in his search for police officers, judges and other officials who had acted against the government for ideological motivations. She defends that her maneuvers only respond to the journalistic work of someone who is writing a book.
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