Leire Díez, a former PSOE militant, has asked the judge investigating her for alleged crimes of influence peddling and corruption to delete the records of the case. Her defense requested the annulment of all the audio, including the one recorded by the prosecutor Ignacio Stampa in the meeting with her and the entrepreneur Javier Pérez-Dolset, in which Díez presents himself as the “right-hand man” of the former secretary of the Socialist Organization Santos Cerdán.
The head of Madrid’s investigative court number 9, Arturo Zamarriego, had summoned Díez and Pérez-Dolset this Monday to declare themselves the main suspects in a “continued and coordinated criminal action” aimed at “collecting compromising or irregular information” from the heads of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Guardia Civil in order to “cancel or squander” investigations into “relevant cases affecting politicians and businessmen”, as he stated in an order.
The meeting was scheduled for both of them at half past eleven in the morning, but they entered the room only at noon. Judge Zamarriego decided that they will enter together to listen to the three and a half hours of recording collected by Stampa in a meeting on May 7th. In that audio, Díez is heard saying that he is Cerdán’s “right-hand man”, or that he is “the person that the PSOE appointed” to investigate abuses of prosecutors and police officers.
In the appeal presented by Leire Díez’s lawyer, to which EL PAÍS had access, it is underlined that Stampa carried out an “extraprocedural and prospective investigation” violating the right of Díez and the entrepreneur Pérez-Dolset to maintain the secrecy of communications. He explains that the public prosecutor did not have a court order and that he launched an investigation “without previously reporting the facts” after the meeting in the office of the former president of the construction company Sacyr Vallehermoso Luis del Rivero.
Díez is asking to delete a second recording, the one made in the office of Cerdán’s current lawyer, Jacobo Teijelo, last February. In it, Díez and Pérez-Dolset talk to a hydrocarbon trader prosecuted by the National Court for fraud. The former socialist militant offered to meet the Prosecutor’s Office if it would provide her with information, among other things, on the lieutenant colonel of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard: “I need Balas, okay? That’s right, I need Balas,” she said.
The defense claims that in that case the “right to professional secrecy” and the “confidentiality of communications” prevailed because it involved a meeting in a lawyer’s office. He stresses that this is an “illegitimate interference” with the rights of all the people present at that “private” meeting and that the purpose was to “work out a strategy” for some clients. The appeal explains that the media fragmented that audio with “journalistic interest” and that, furthermore, none of the interlocutors consented to the recording.
Along the same lines, Pérez-Dolset’s defense presented another brief asking for clarification as to why he was summoned for the investigation while he had initially been called to testify. “From what has been done so far it appears that a possible instruction is being carried out,” the appeal reads. In his opinion, the investigation is based on “newspaper clippings” and the meeting with Stampa, in which the entrepreneur participated, does not involve criminal acts because he himself recognized that “they neither asked him anything nor promised him anything”, he indicates. “Respect for freedom of the press and the right to information can never translate, under penalty of weakening the foundations of the rule of law, into transferring the conclusions of the work of the press into a criminal investigation”, he reflects.
