The Supreme Court names Santos Cerdán as the leader of the corruption plot and sends him to prison.

MadridDressed in a jacket and tie, with no spare clothes, Santos Cerdán hadn't been warned that once he entered the Supreme Court, he wouldn't leave his feet. In a matter of days, the former number three of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) will have gone from being Pedro Sánchez's right-hand man at Ferraz to entering Soto del Real prison this Monday, after his first statement as a suspect in what has become the Cerdán case, a corruption scandal that has abruptly shaken the Spanish legislature. Until recently, the Socialist party's organizational secretary has denied being the "leader" of an alleged scheme to collect illegal commissions derived from contract awards, as portrayed by the Prosecutor's Office and the investigating judge, and has chosen to present himself as a victim of "political persecution" for being the person who made possible the political shift against Mariano Rajoy and Pedro Sánchez's new investiture in 2023 in exchange for an amnesty for the independence movement. "I am one of the architects of achieving progressive governments in Spain. We have been attacked especially since 2023, and that is why I am here," he stated during his statement.

Not even the former presidents of Andalusia convicted—later exonerated—in the Andalusian ERE case set foot in prison, although former high-ranking officials from the governments of Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán did. The image is extremely harsh for the PSOE and the Spanish government, which has tried at all costs to distance itself from Cerdán's imprisonment. "This is a matter involving a person who has nothing to do with the PSOE," stated First Vice President María Jesús Montero. From Seville, President Sánchez claimed that the party had acted quickly by removing him as soon as the Civil Guard report that implicated him became known. In this sense, sources from the Moncloa strongly disagree with Cerdán's story according to which he is the victim of a political operation and highlight the "obvious" signs that incriminate him. "The person that Sánchez personally ratified six months ago [precisely at the PSOE congress in Seville as secretary of organization] is going to prison without bail, accused of criminal organization and bribery, among other charges [influence peddling]. If that does not merit resignation and elections, it is because he already lacks any sense of reality Feijóo, in X.

A political defense

Cerdán even used the same word Sánchez used in his letter for the five days of reflection to describe the opposition on land, sea, and air that he claimed to be suffering: mud"We don't like a government like Sánchez's, which has made great progress, it annoys these powers and drags us through the mud," stated the former number three of the PSOE. During his interrogation, in which he only responded to his lawyer, the former CUP deputy Benet Salellas, he stressed that he is in this situation because he was the PSOE's interlocutor with EH Bildu and the PNV when it came to seeking support for the motion of censure against Rajoy in 2018. With Esquerra, it was the Minister of the Presidency and Justice, Félix Bolaños.

"That's why he was the next target."

"What did he say?" the judge asked him.

"The person responsible was Félix Bolaños, so he could be the next target," Cerdán clarified.

Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Alejandro Luzón countered that Cerdán's explanations are "poor and biased" and criticized the "victim-playing" story as an "offensive insinuation" to the public prosecutor's office. To the surprise of lawyer Salellas, the prosecutor read a speech in which he requested his client's imprisonment, and he already pointed out that more embezzled money may come to light throughout the investigation, something that the judge later elaborated on in a forceful carThe lawyer denounced an "aggravation" against the other suspects, former minister José Luis Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García, who have been ordered to withdraw their passports and be required to appear in court every two weeks as precautionary measures.

Cerdán's defense team expresses surprise that Judge Leopoldo Puente rejected the search of the politician's home and now considers there to be a high risk of evidence being tampered with. They believe that the imprisonment without bail has no basis or justification and points to other reasons. One hypothesis is that the goal is to get Cerdán to incriminate more people, which they rule out, and another is that the goal is to deepen the wounds of the Spanish government, which would be consistent with their accusations in their defense strategy.

Question the audios

In his statement, Cerdán categorically denied his involvement in the scheme of alleged illegal commissions arising from public contracts and stressed that neither he nor the PSOE have taken any money.

Responding to questions from his lawyer, he said that the transcripts of those conversations are not complete, but rather fragments, and that what the Civil Guard claims in its report based on these audio recordings is "completely untrue" in Cerdán's opinion. and the Burying train tracks underground in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, and has pointed out that he was simply concerned about this during the pre-election campaign for the municipal elections in May 2019 so he could claim them for the elections; not to obtain a financial benefit, he insisted. However, the judge in his ruling has given full veracity to these audio documents.

The UCO also attributes to him a 45% stake in one of the companies mentioned, Servinabar, owned by a friend of his, Joseba Antxón Alonso, based on a private contract according to which Cerdán acquired them for 6,000 euros. The former number three of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) claimed that this contract was not formally signed and that he did not pay the money. When he considered entering the business world in 2016, his wife convinced him to continue in politics, he explained. He said that she then ordered Antxón Alonso to break the agreement. This friend is precisely the one who provided him with contacts within the PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) and EH Bildu (Basque Nationalist Party) when he needed to convince them to allow Sánchez to take the plunge.