Jewels, carpets, and mobile phones: this is how the search in the office of ex-president Zapatero went

Madrid8:17 AM, May 19. The police arrive with a judicial order at number 35 Ferraz street, first floor left. It is the office of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He is not there, they are opened by "doña Gertrudis" –his secretary, Gertrudis Alcázar–, who is the person who will be present during the entire search. She collaborates with the agents, whom she voluntarily lets in, and they begin to search all the premises: five offices, three empty rooms, two bathrooms, a meeting room, and a kitchenette.

This is evident from the report included in the Plus Ultra case file, to which ARA has had access, and which lists all the items seized from him, including a safe with jewelry and travel gifts. The same file states that Gertrudis Alcázar informed the agents that the safe belonged to the former president's home and that the contents were, in part, from an inheritance from Zapatero's wife, Sonsoles Espinosa.

From here, the report lists the seized jewelry: a silver necklace with thirteen blue stones, another with two green stones, and a bracelet with two red stones, as well as various earrings and watches that the police meticulously describe in the file. In fact, they attach photographs, as can be seen below.

Besides the jewelry, the police also took folders corresponding to different companies for which Zapatero would have handled some business: Chinalink Asia, Analisis Relevante (the company in Julio Martínez Martínez's sights), ICD Instituto Diplomacia Cultural, Ernst and Young, Kreab, Almatech, Editorial Planeta and Thinking Heads, which according to the UDEF report paid for services to the corporate structure under judicial scrutiny.

At the same time, the police have seized several diaries from the former president, as well as Gertrudis Alcázar's mobile phone, both personal and work-related. The UDEF presents the former president's office as an “operational management center” and a “nucleus for receiving and issuing instructions” from which Zapatero's “strategic guidelines are systematically channeled”.

Following the searches, the judge investigating the case, José Luis Calama, has signed an order in which he asks the police to access all of the former president's emails from the last five years. Specifically, from the following addresses: presidentzapatero@presidentzapatero.com and whathefav.com, which is the corporate name of Zapatero's daughters' company. In parallel, he also requests information from SEPI's email that is related to the Plus Ultra bailout.

The former president's residence

In another report –the third one known so far–, the UDEF states that Zapatero not only gave directives from his office, but that decisions or actions could also be executed within the framework of “the personal sphere”. At this point, it directly points to the private home of the former Spanish president: there, for example, he received boxes of wine or issued invoices to Análisis Relevante, the company of his friend Julio Martínez Martínez, which the UDEF places at the epicenter of the alleged scheme.

“The home is profiled as a suitable space for the channeling and custody of strategic planning of instructions that involved a higher sensitivity. The planning and direction core would not be confined solely to the office environment, but would move to his home, where he would have greater control and security of information”, summarizes the report.

With this reasoning, the UDEF asked the judge to authorize a search and seizure of Zapatero's home, but José Luis Calama closed the door. He argued that it was not necessary because there were no “concrete and specific indications” that “relevant evidence, instruments of the crime, or documentation linked” to the facts could be found there. “The search cannot become a merely exploratory or prospective action”, he replied to stop the UDEF.

The judge provided two more arguments. First, that the “wide media coverage” and the “notoriety” of the judicial case made it “raisonably presumable” that any evidence would have been “removed, destroyed, or transferred”. And second, that the search of his office was an “alternative route” to obtain evidence without having to access the private home.

Gold exports and oil marketing

The other leg of the UDEF investigation that appears in the summary is the alleged intermediation that Zapatero carried out in the gold and oil business. In this regard, another of the alleged clients of the alleged scheme is the Venezuelan Domingo Amaro Chacón.

In January 2024, he informed Julio Martínez Martínez of various international business projects: one related to China and one from a Swiss trader, Philip Apikian. Domingo Amaro explained to him that Apikian had met on two occasions with Delcy Rodríguez, vice-president of Venezuela, whom he calls La Dama, to discuss the commercialization of oil and pet coke, a derivative of the crude oil refining process. “They are ready to travel to the origin and to buy. [...] They pressured all of December,” said Domingo Amaro.

The report refers to a letter in which Apikian showed interest in buying pet coke from Venezuela in lots of 50,000 tons. A few months earlier, Zapatero had met in Beijing with the Communist Party's company.

However, the relationship between Domingo Amaro and Julio Martínez Martínez had been functioning, at least, since September 2021. In fact, the conversation analyzed by the UDEF refers to other projects. They talk, for example, about the “commercialization of yellow” –referring to gold–, about the Compañía General de Minería de Venezuela –Minerven–, about Loma de Níquel –the main commercial nickel ophiolite mine in Venezuela–, about the sale of shares in Qwant –a French search engine– or about the conversion of euros into cash into other currencies in Caracas.