The PSOE manager holds Santos Cerdán responsible for the payments under suspicion in the Leire Díez case

MadridThe PSOE maintains the script it has established since the Leire Díez case broke out and continues to build a wall between Ferraz and the woman known as the socialist fixer. Now it has been the turn of Ana María Fuentes, the current party manager, who has testified at the National Court as being under investigation for forgery of commercial documents. The Civil Guard and Judge Santiago Pedraz suspect that she falsified invoices and order notes to get money to Leire Díez and conceal the payments. Sources present at the statement recount to the ARA that Ana María Fuentes has shifted the blame onto Santos Cerdán, who at that time was the party's number 3 and is also under investigation, alleging that he was the one who made the decisions and who ordered and gave approval for the order notes, the invoices, and the payments. She did what he told her, she limited herself to paying and "did not control" expressly and specifically what the money was spent on.

She has justified that the PSOE hired two external lawyers –Ismael Oliver and Jacobo Teijelo– because there was a high volume of litigation and that it was a regular procedure. First the contract was "verbal" and then they put it in black and white in an order note. Subsequently, socialist sources add that the party "habitually hires" firms "specialized in different matters" and defend that the manager "is unaware" of the content of the work and "limited herself" to "reviewing contracts previously examined" by the Legal Department. Once again, the same official voices reiterate that the manager "formalizes, documents, and processes" the work commissioned by the Organization Secretariat –which Santos Cerdán occupied– and orders them to be paid following his instructions. They are "ordinary expenses" that "are not the responsibility" of either Pedro Sánchez or the party's leadership.

In a statement of less than two hours, answering all parties –including the PP, which leads the popular accusations– and acknowledging that she was nervous, the PSOE manager also stated that she had no dealings with Leire Díez: she knew nothing about her, they did not meet, she did not see her at Ferraz, and she did not know that there were meetings with her. Regarding the purchase of train and plane tickets for the then-PSOE militant, she pointed to the two employees who handled the arrangements, who –she said– did not go through her.

The Civil Guard's thesis

The Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard believes that Ana María Fuentes, with the “intermediation” of Leire Díez, “falsified” two engagement letters to the law firm of Ismael Oliver and to Jacobo Teijelo, who is a lawyer for Santos Cerdán. A report by the armed institute stated that the socialists hired them in exchange for “advice and analysis of different matters of a legal nature” with “verbal notes, informative notes and proposals for action”. “They would have been signed in a merely instrumental manner, with the purpose of simulating a professional relationship and serving as a means for the political group to be able to make payments that would have been used to finance the allegedly criminal activity”, it related.

Judge Santiago Pedraz maintains that she issued the two engagement letters on dates when “there is no record that they were providing legal advice” to the PSOE. The suspicion is that the payments served to “remunerate” the maneuvers that Leire Díez was allegedly instigating to “protect” the socialists and Pedro Sánchez. The judge pointed to Ana María Fuentes for a “concrete and auxiliary intervention” that places her in a position of “co-authorship or complicity”.

What are the payments in question? First, between June and September 2024, Leire Díez received 16,000 euros from Zaño Consultora, Gaspar Zarrías's company, which had allegedly received the money from the PSOE. Later, the then-socialist militant received 27,225 euros from Ismael Oliver's firm. Finally, Jacobo Teijelo received 125,000 euros from the PSOE which –according to the Prosecutor's Office– were intended to pay him and could be the “vehicle” to remunerate Leire Díez, even though “the payments” from him to her “have not been proven”. At the end of July, the judge requested information from twelve banks to track, precisely, all this money.

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office argues that the alleged criminal plot articulated an “intricate system of financial support” in which it used companies belonging to those under investigation with the “presumed agreement” of the PSOE manager in order to make payments “without revealing the ordering party”. When he testified as a suspect, Jacobo Teijelo argued that the PSOE hired him to study what could happen with the cases involving the party's environment.

The only person from the PSOE under investigation

Ana María Fuentes is the only person from the current PSOE who is under investigation in this case. Initially, two Ferraz workers, Covadonga San Pedro Pascual and Celia Rodríguez, were also under investigation, but the magistrate dismissed it, arguing that they limited themselves to “executing the orders” they received from Santos Cerdán to manage the trips and meetings of those under investigation and that there is no evidence that the two of them “knew” they were carrying out the “illicit plan”.