Cerdán's strategy to dismantle the case: an expert opinion on whether the audio recordings are authentic

BarcelonaOn Monday, the defense of Santos Cerdán, former number three of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party), moved the Supreme Court on two fronts: first, they requested the original copies of the audio recordings in which he is allegedly heard speaking with former Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García about alleged illegal kickbacks; and second, they requested the history of the Civil Guard and Koldo García, insisting on the hypothesis that the former advisor was a police source from the outset. These two moves are part, according to sources from Cerdán's defense consulted by ARA, of a fundamental strategy to try to dismantle the case, which is based primarily on the conversations. that have become public and in which the protagonists of the case can be heard talking about public works, money, and, in the case of Ábalos and Koldo García, also about prostitutes. Now, how does the defense, led by lawyers Benet Salellas and Jacobo Teijelo, intend to challenge audio recordings that until now everyone has taken as true?

The strategy involves requesting expert testimony on the audio files. At this time, defense sources admit that they cannot sustain a specific hypothesis to challenge them as evidence and that, therefore, one of the next steps will be to ask an expert to rule, within the framework of the case, on whether Santos Cerdán is the person appearing in the conversations. The experts, in this case, would be the specialists in charge of identifying whether the voice appearing in the audio recordings is real and, secondarily, whether it belongs to the defendants. Cerdán declared to the Supreme Court that he did not recognize himself, as did Ábalos.

The audio recordings are the basis of the Civil Guard report that led to the political crisis in the Cerdán case, and to which Spanish President Pedro Sánchez himself gave credibility by removing his former right-hand man. According to the police, their origin is some recordings they found on Koldo García's mobile devices during a search of his home: they found 23. From these devices, according to the police, they extracted 15 hours of conversations, but according to sources involved in the case, there are around 2,500 that are not yet available to the parties in the investigation. For this reason, they have requested "the originality" and "the entirety."

The dumping diligence

Beyond the expert report, Cerdán's lawyers present technical defense arguments against these audio files. In the appeal they filed against the former PSOE leader's pretrial detention, they criticized the lack of any "recovery proceedings" for the audio files. What does this mean? They were not opened before the judicial attorney who was present during the search of Koldo García's home because, according to the Civil Guard, they were not found until all the phones were examined. "In this context, a recovery strategy would be especially important," the lawyers state. In other words, they are demanding that the origin of the audio files be officially recorded. In addition, the defense also wants access to the so-called code. hash of each of the sound files, or in other words, the identification code according to which the audios have not been altered.

The "provoked crime"

The strategy of questioning the authenticity of the audio recordings is also linked to portraying Koldo García as a collaborator of the Civil Guard, whom they accuse of acting intentionally against the former Socialist leader. Specifically, they say he was "a regular collaborator with the police in the fight against terrorism, even decorated in 2018, hired as an escort, and pardoned." A thesis that the investigating judge of the case at the Supreme Court, Leopoldo Puente, has categorically denied and dismissed.

Why does Cerdán's lawyer cling to this? In the appeal against his pretrial detention, he makes it explicit. He cites a doctrine of the European Court of Human Rights to affirm that any "provoked" material or "provoked crime"—alluding to a hypothetical collaboration between Koldo García and the police—has no place in the criminal investigation. In short, the defense concludes: "Audio recordings made and preserved in fragments for years by a possible police collaborator who ends up as a co-investigator are not the best, objective, and independent evidence to grant provisional imprisonment." For now, Judge Puente has given them full credibility to conclude who Pedro Sánchez's former right-hand man was.