Cas Montoro: an investigation against all odds
When the full story of the seven-year investigation into the Montoro case is to be written, the prosecutor in charge of the case, Carmen María García Cerdá, will have to be given a very prominent place. has had to face Over the years, he has worked with his superiors to successfully navigate an investigation that some seemed to have a vested interest in torpedoing. Given the clear evidence in the case file, it's hard to understand why the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office would backtrack on some key steps, such as the tapping of the phones of those involved, which was only active for a few days, or the access to the corporate emails of senior Treasury officials to investigate a possible crime of disclosure of secrets.
Anti-corruption prosecutor Alejandro Luzón denied García Cerdá permission to investigate Minister Montoro's and other members of the ministry's access to the tax data of celebrities and other politicians. And when Luzón learned that the prosecutor had asked the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) not to let that branch of the investigation die, he fined her €1,000 for "serious disobedience." In the end, however, it was the persistence and stubbornness of this prosecutor, together with the good technical work of the Mossos d'Esquadra and the discretion of Judge Rubén Rus, that allowed the plot to be uncovered.
It is evident that all these obstacles, as well as the slowness of the Civil Guard –which also exasperated the prosecutor–, it cannot be directly deduced that there was an express intention to hinder the investigation, but it does seem to have caused obvious unease in many offices in Madrid. In some ways, the fact that the initiative of an investigation affecting the heart of the state outside the Mossos d'Esquadra and the fact that the investigation was being conducted from a court in Tarragona would provoke a mixture of unease and astonishment.
Despite the solidity of the evidence presented in the summary, it should be noted that the entire case is threatened with nullity due to the fact that the evidence that gives rise to the case, the email in which the head of a gas company in Tarragona stated that the Economic Team should be hired because it had a "direct link to Montoro," was found to have a direct link. This is the main defense strategy of both the members of the firm and the former senior officials of the ministry and the directors of the gas companies.
However, we must also congratulate the professionalism of the Mossos d'Esquadra in this case, in an investigation that was carried out in a particularly difficult context for the Catalan police, such as the years immediately following 2017, and for the attitude of the prosecutor and the judge. In some ways, this case represents a ray of hope in the fight against corruption, a scourge that, as seen in this case and others—such as the Koldo case—is much more widespread than we thought and affects not only the public sector but also the private sector, especially large companies.
