At what point is the Montoro case a year after it came to light?

MadridOn July 16, 2025, seven years after leaving the Ministry of Finance, it became publicly known that Cristóbal Montoro – along with his team – was being investigated by a judge in Tarragona for allegedly trafficking in the modification of laws to favor gas companies in exchange for bribes. In twelve months, the investigation has progressed slowly and Rubén Rus's orders have arrived sporadically. One of the major new developments was a report from the Tax Agency that located 850,000 suspicious euros: this is the amount that gas companies sent to Equipo Económico – the firm founded by Montoro and at the epicenter of the alleged scheme – between 2011 and 2019 in installments and with an operation to try to disguise them. Around this document, the two visions of the investigation that have been constructed can be traced.

On the one hand, this document was the pretext that led the judge to make a battery of new information requests to complete the data he already had. A few days ago, he extended the investigation because he is still waiting for the reports he commissioned. However, sources familiar with the case reveal to ARA that 2 CDs from the Mossos d'Esquadra have arrived at the courts with so much information that it cannot be uploaded to the cloud and must be collected in person.

FETAP-CGT, which is one of the popular prosecutions, requested an extension of the investigation to avoid a "premature conclusion" that would create impunity. Another prosecution, the Association for the Integral Defense of Specialized Victims (ADIVE), maintains that it was necessary to "deepen and underpin" the investigation. On the other hand, Equipo Económico believes that this report and the successive requests made by the magistrate are a maneuver to "artificially and indefinitely prolong" the case and consistently refers to a report from the Civil Guard that analyzed bank accounts and did not detect a "differentiated or remarkable operation".

The information that the judge is waiting for

A month and a half after the Treasury report, the magistrate made a move to "complete it" and because the banking information he had received had "deficiencies". First, he authorized the Mossos to access the Register of Financial Ownership. Later, he issued a battery of orders to different banks to provide data on a handful of people since 2006. The Prosecutor's Office warns that some banks "have not complied" with the requests in their "entirety", which will require reiterating them, and Equipo Económico criticizes that a period of twenty years constitutes an "exorbitant, disproportionate and irrational" scrutiny. He requested, for example, information from six banks about Cristóbal Montoro, from seven banks about his brother, and from two about his wife.

Previously, he had requested other data. He required the Ministry of Treasury to resend 53 emails and 89 files that could not be analyzed because they were in an HTML format that referred to an internal server of the ministry. And, among other things, he claimed the annual accounts of Equipo Económico from 2008 to 2025 and the documentation and invoices that prove the services that the firm provided to the gas companies. Coinciding with the extension of the investigation, the judge has asked the Mossos what the "state of the investigations" is and the "full compliance" with all the requests he has made.

For its part, the main complaint of the firm founded by Montoro is that the judge has been repeating himself when requesting information: "No matter how many times he does it, he will hardly be able to give a different result, even if he doesn't like it," he maintained in a document a few months ago. His defense considers that "he has entered into a perverse game with unnecessary and superfluous requests" that are heading towards a "merely prospective investigation, full of unspecific suspicions" and that cause "undue delay". "A journey undertaken to nowhere," they conclude.

While waiting for the investigated parties to testify

In parallel, so far, the judge has summoned fifteen investigated individuals from the gas companies to testify: ten individuals and five companies. And all but one have availed themselves of their right not to testify, alleging that the Tarragona High Court must rule on who is competent to investigate the facts. The judge and the prosecution maintain that the case should remain there because the first clues appeared in Tarragona, but the Economic Team argues that the firm is based in Madrid and the discussions about the modifications to the laws – which they maintain were legitimate – took place in the Spanish capital.

According to what ARA has been able to learn, the deliberation, voting, and decision on this matter will take place on Monday, September 14. The reality is that there are still twenty investigated individuals to be summoned, including the directors of Equipo Económico, high-ranking officials from that era at the Ministry of Finance, and Cristóbal Montoro. The lawyer for one of the investigated individuals anticipates to this newspaper that he will follow the same path if the judge summons him prematurely. For the moment, no witness has been summoned. Furthermore, the fact that statements cannot be made via videoconference complicates logistics.