Plus Ultra executives involved in the Zapatero case resign

MadridThe president of Plus Ultra Línies Aèries, Julio Martínez Sola, and the CEO of the same entity, Roberto Rosselli, involved in the Zapatero case, have resigned from their positions. They did so while being investigated for the loan the company received during the pandemic, as reported by ACB sources and confirmed by EFE.

The resignations come after more than a year of investigation by UDEF agents, and after both admitted before the National Court that the airline had signed a contract with the company of Julio Martínez Martínez, in which it assumed the payment of "large sums of money" for "support" services to the airline.

In the same case, the National Court judge investigating the Plus Ultra case, José Luis Calama, supports the investigation against José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and rejects the incident of nullity of proceedings of the case that had been filed by the defense of the former Spanish president. The magistrate argues that Zapatero filed the brief "outside the 20-day period provided by law since the party had access to the proceedings." In parallel, Calama continues with the investigation and summons the president of Plus Ultra, Julio Martínez Sola, and the company's CEO, Roberto Roselli Mielle, to testify as investigated parties on September 7 and 8 at nine in the morning.

In an order to which ARA has had access, Calama points out that the period for filing an incident of nullity is 20 days, which begin to run from the moment the affected party has effective knowledge of the act that violates the fundamental right. Zapatero's lawyer filed on June 25 an incident of nullity for alleged violation of fundamental rights, days after the 20-day period provided by law since the parties had material access to the case proceedings had expired. 

Zapatero's defense has replied to the judge with a brief in which it requests that his resolution be annulled and that the order to reject the request to annul the case in which he is being investigated be "rectified." The lawyer for the former Spanish president, Víctor Moreno Catena, alleges that it was on May 29 when the separate piece containing the Public Prosecutor's investigation proceedings was incorporated into the Cloud platform.

Calama, on the other hand, maintains that Zapatero filed the incident following access to the Cloud platform, which occurred on May 25, when the communication was sent to all parties. He states that the former president should have filed the nullity request by June 23 at the latest, and that he did so two days later. "Untimeliness deprives the judicial body of the competence to examine the merits of the alleged injury, because the incident cannot operate as a mechanism to question investigative decisions that should have been challenged in time," rules the magistrate in the same document.

In the order, the judge argues that "it is not identified with subjective valuations or with the strategic convenience of the challenge, but rather with real and sufficient access to the content of the action: disclosure of the proceedings, delivery of copies, consultation of the file, or any act that allows knowledge of the existence and scope of the injury."

In the appeal he filed at the time, the former Spanish president requested the exclusion from the proceedings of twelve resolutions, including the entry and search of his office on May 18 and the separate proceeding to investigate the origin of the seized jewelry, the first appraisal of which gave a preliminary value of 1.3 million euros. Zapatero's defense claimed the "general nullity" of the investigation, considering that the rights to a fair trial with all guarantees, effective judicial protection, presumption of innocence, privacy, data protection, and secrecy of third-party communications had been violated. Specifically, the former president's lawyer denounced the incorporation into the proceedings of evidence "illicitly analyzed" that had served "to justify the adoption of other measures restricting fundamental rights." Thus, he requested the exclusion from the process of evidence obtained in all ordered entries and searches.

The Public Prosecutor's Office asks the judge for a new report on Zapatero's jewelry

Concurrently, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has asked Judge José Luis Calama to expand the information on the jewelry that UDEF found in the safe of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's office. The public prosecutor's office wants to know the current market value of the jewelry and the date it was manufactured. This was reported by El Mundo and confirmed by fiscal sources to ARA. Initially, the auction house Ansorena valued them at 1.3 million euros, a figure that led the instructor of the Plus Ultra case to open a separate piece to investigate Zapatero also for tax fraud and smuggling. 24 hours ago, in an interview on Spanish Television, the former Spanish president limited himself to explaining that the jewelry was a “personal courtesy gift from many years ago” and that they had “neither use nor purpose” nor “patrimonial intent”. And he even acknowledged that, seen with perspective, he probably would not have accepted them: “They give me a deep allergy”.