Agents of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard presented themselves this Friday at the Post Office and the Ministries of Finance and Ecological Transition to request documents relating to the case for which the former president of the Spanish Company of Industrial Participations (SEPI) Vicente Fernández, the former PSOE activist Leire Díez and the businessman Antxon Alonso are detained.
Judge Antonio Piña will take statements from the three detainees next Saturday. In the meantime, they will remain in the police stations. Piña will then decide whether to send those concerned to prison or subject them to other less serious precautionary measures and also whether to recuse himself in favor of the Supreme Court, where Antxon Alonso is already under investigation due to the arrest of José Luis Ábalos, or whether the other tribunal of the National Court that began investigating the Koldo case has jurisdiction.
The arrests, searches and requests for information carried out since Wednesday are part of an ongoing operation carried out by UCO agents on the orders of the magistrate, as part of a case remaining under summary secrecy and promoted by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office. Investigations are underway into alleged crimes of prevarication, embezzlement, influence peddling and criminal organization.
The demands of this Friday are in addition to the demands made in various public companies in recent hours. In addition to SEPI, a public company that charges almost 6 billion euros per year, the agents demanded from Mercasa, which manages the central supply markets, contracts for the period between 2021 and 2023. That is, once Vicente Fernández left SEPI and began collecting from Servinabar, Antxon Alonso’s company was considered a means of collecting bribes of Santos Cerdán and the rest of the members of the conspiracy that the Supreme Court is investigating.
Vicente Fernández became president of SEPI in June 2018, with the PSOE coming to power, and remained in office until October 2019. A trusted politician of the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, he spent only 15 months at the head of the public company until his alleged involvement in the Aznalcóllar affair led to his dismissal.
It is from this moment that his suspicious activity begins. Vicente Fernández then began looking for work within the PSOE, party sources explain. The same sources believe that the former PSOE organizational secretary Santos Cerdán would have responded to Vicente Fernández’s work concerns by putting him in contact with Antxon Alonso.
Among the public companies to which investigators had access this Thursday also include Sepides (Industrial Promotion and Business Development) and Enusa, a public company in the nuclear sector dependent on SEPI, where Leire Díez held a management position between October 2018 and December 2021. Socialist leaders claim that during this stage Leire Díez attended some meetings of the public company with Vicente Fernández.
In addition to these public companies, the agents visited Forestalia facilities in Zaragoza and Madrid; at the tax consultancy firm Conaudire, in the Aragonese capital, or at the Cemsal company.
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