The National Court requests the PSOE to provide details of cash payments made between 2017 and 2024

BarcelonaThe National Court judge investigating the Koldo García case, Ismael Moreno, has requested that the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) provide him with a list of all cash payments made between 2017 and 2024. The magistrate wants the Socialists to submit the documentation within a maximum of 10 days. "The PSOE wishes to clarify that we are not under investigation in this case, and that our commitment to transparency, as well as our cooperation with the justice system, is absolute. We will provide the court with the requested documentation," stated Socialist sources. Weeks ago, the party headquarters in Ferraz specifically provided details of cash payments made to José Luis Ábalos, Santos Cerdán, Koldo García, and the party's Organizational Secretary. The judge is acting at the request of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which seeks to dispel doubts about the income of the former Minister of Transport and former PSOE Organizational Secretary, as well as his former advisor. The public prosecutor's office speaks of a possible criminal offense ranging "from money laundering" to a possible embezzlement committed against the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). According to the ruling of the National Court magistrate, the investigations carried out in the Supreme Court regarding the Koldo case do not "sufficiently clarify" the origin of the cash that Ábalos received, which appears in one of the reports submitted by the Central Operational Unit (UCO).

Cerdán questions the UCO

Santos Cerdán, who on Wednesday brought the UCO reports into sharp focus, presented an expert report concluding that the wiretapped audio recordings of Koldo García, which were used to incriminate the former number three of the PSOE in the Supreme Court, were "manipulated." His defense team submitted this document to Supreme Court Justice Leopoldo Puente, who is presiding over the case of alleged corruption involving the collection of illegal commissions in the awarding of public works contracts, a case that has implicated the Socialists. In July, the Supreme Court ruled out any manipulation of these recordings, a key element in the UCO report of the Civil Guard that led to Cerdán's provisional imprisonment. The former PSOE organizational secretary He was released last week.

"From the exhaustive analysis carried out [...] on the audio files under examination, these experts consider a convergent set of technical, temporal, structural, and methodological inconsistencies to be proven," states the report presented by Cerdán's lawyers, Benet Salellas. They base this conclusion on the analysis of the files' metadata, which, according to the experts, demonstrates that someone could have edited, reconstructed, or transferred the audio at a time after its recording. And that, thereforenor what is said Nor would the dates provided be entirely reliable.

In this regard, the report points to "the presence of iOS version signatures [the iPhone operating system] that are chronologically impossible based on the dates appearing in the file names and metadata." It also notes "objective anomalies incompatible with a native digital lifecycle," such as "significant discrepancies between the actual recording time and the encoding time" or "massive" coincidences in file modification dates: "These can only be explained by export, reassembly, or technical manipulation." The document was prepared by experts Javier Martín Porras and Hernán López Mayoralas, who warn that the analysis carried out by the UCO (Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard) at the time did not address "the authenticity" of the audio recordings, even though Judge Puente had requested it.

What are the implications?

What implications do these conclusions have for the defendants? "Since the analysis has not been done frame to frame"It cannot be maintained that the recordings have not been altered, edited, or inserted from external sources," the document states. The experts offer several possible explanations for the detected anomalies. The hypotheses they put forward range from the possible interception of the conversations by spyware, which may have compromised files "during the extraction or analysis processes." However, the experts also admit that the anomalous traces could have occurred during the restoration of backups or the transfer of the audio through channels such as AirDrop, cloud services, or email.

To rule out the involvement of spyware, the original recordings of the material—prepared by the National Court, not the Supreme Court—in the possession of the investigators would need to be accessed. However, the report concludes that "it cannot be assumed, without further investigation, that all recordings were generated locally by the user using the native Voice Memos application."

Poor sound quality

The report also criticizes the investigators for identifying the speakers in the audio recordings (such as Ábalos or Cerdán himself) without conducting any phonetic analysis, even in cases where the audio quality was poor and the UCO (Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard) had to apply technical processes to improve the sound. "It cannot be scientifically maintained that the voices analyzed belong to the same person, even though they can be reliably attributed to a specific individual," they assert. Finally, both experts warn of an "irreparable break in the chain of custody" of the audio recordings and conclude that it is not possible to state with certainty that the files examined correspond "to the first forensic copies obtained" when they were seized. In other words, further computer checks should be carried out before it can be concluded "with a reasonable degree of certainty" that the analyzed files correspond to the original recordings. Cerdán and Hernando, cited in the Leire case

Pending the effect of this new expert report, the Cerdán case It is progressing with some connection to another case that involves the PSOE.The investigation is being led by journalist and alleged party fixer Leire Díez. This Wednesday, the Madrid court handling the case summoned Cerdán and Antonio Hernando, former deputy chief of staff to Pedro Sánchez and current Secretary of State for Telecommunications and Digital Infrastructure, to testify as witnesses. Both will have to appear before the judge on February 2nd at 10:30 a.m., along with businessmen Alejandro Hamlyn and Luis del Rivero.