"The Treasury Department investigated me because I bothered the minister": Montoro's other victims speak out.

MadridSeptember 26, 2017, 10:02 a.m. The head of the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF), José Manuel de Alarcón Estella, sends an email to the director of the Tax Agency (AEAT), Santiago Menéndez Menéndez. He notifies him of the results of a tax analysis on a journalist. The journalist is Javier Chicote, head of the investigation for the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF).Abc"The email contains a report with your tax information and your relationships with other taxpayers" and it appears that "they will initiate a tax inspection," the Mossos d'Esquadra state in a 2022 document included. to the summary of the Cristóbal Montoro case to which ARA has had accessThis communication raised suspicions among the Catalan judicial police because the tax investigation into Chicote "seems to coincide with the first news stories published by the journalist regarding the Minister of Finance and his relationship with the Economic Team (EE) law firm, which began in April 2017." [My case is crystal clear: I'm being inspected by the top brass of the Treasury. I'm not the president of a bank. I'm a self-employed person with a normal turnover.

In the report exchanged by the former senior Treasury officials, according to the journalist himself, even his daughter, who was 3 years old at the time, his mother-in-law and information about the inheritance of his father, who died in 1999 when Chicote was only 19 years old, appear. "It is a prospective investigation" that shows "the use of the Treasury for personal purposes" during the Montoro era, concludes the journalist from theAbc, who was unaware that the former Popular Party minister's team had been investigating him until a couple of years ago, when the information was leaked as part of the then still secret investigation in the Tarragona court that has now indicted Montoro and, among other former collaborators, Santiago Menéndez, the recipient of the email from eight years ago. The instructor of the case, Rubén Rus Vela, has ruled out investigating this branch of the case and focuses solely on trafficking in laws. Chicote has unsuccessfully attempted to join as a private prosecutor, but he's not throwing in the towel.

The journalist's lawyer is preparing a complaint to be filed in the Madrid courts between August and September. In Chicote's case, his tax information was never made public during Montoro's second term at the Treasury (2011-2018), as other affected parties have claimed, pointing to the former minister as a suspected leaker to the press.like the former president of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, and the former vice president of the Spanish government, Rodrigo Rato—and he was not sanctioned either because no irregularities were found against him. However, Chicote "has no doubt" that the investigation ad hoc What they did to him is a crime and a practice that the Treasury leadership under Montoro carried out "regularly." "It must have been very common because in my case [in the email] they say it completely normally and with surprising ease. I think they did it all the time. There are many more cases."

The revelation of these allegedly structural practices following the outbreak of the Montoro scandal two weeks ago raised the suspicions of former Compromís senator Carles Mulet, who engaged in "visceral" clashes with the former minister in the Upper House and who is being targeted by the Treasury. A year later, an administrative court ultimately dismissed him. "Now, after everything that's been published and seeing how the ministry seems to have been used to make life difficult for political adversaries, I'm considering this could be my case. I have no proof that it wasn't pure coincidence, but I do have many doubts, because it was a big coincidence and there was a lot of malice," he explains in a conversation. After twenty years of deducting 100% of his mortgage payments, the Treasury notified him that he had been doing it wrong and that he could only deduct 33%. He suddenly had to pay 10,000 euros.

Apart from these cases, it is known that Montoro would have also obtained tax data from tennis player Rafa Nadal, Baroness Thyssen, the PP's Gürtel case and the former president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol

"Anxiety", "fear" and threats

"It was something done with very bad intentions. Every two weeks I received a notification and they went to very far-fetched extremes. How did the Treasury get hold of a deed of sale from twenty years ago in which my parents appear as guarantors [the reason why they told him the tax deduction was incorrect for the shifts]?" Mulet asks. From a lawyer. He also explains having suffered "anxiety" and "fear" that it would be leaked to the press. "It was an ordeal," he recalls. his family, who also appeared in the report.

In Chicote's case, despite not knowing that he was being investigated, he did receive a direct threat from Montoro.Abc in the halls of Congress that "if they crossed the line" he would take them to court. "But he didn't go to court. What he did was use the Treasury's platforms. Of course, it was action and reaction," reflects the head of research at theAbcMore journalists have reported receiving these types of warnings. This is the case of Federico Quevedo, who a couple of weeks ago told TVE that the former minister "directly threatened" him at a Christmas party at the Moncloa Palace. "He literally told me: 'Either you stop criticizing us or you'll suffer the consequences from the Treasury,'" Quevedo asserted. He claims that, by not rectifying his position, he suffered an economic and professional "ordeal," with his assets seized and being removed from all the media outlets he worked with. "I hit rock bottom and was on the verge of suicide," he confessed.

The attempt to investigate the leaks

Rodrigo Rato, like Chicote, is also fighting in court to secure an investigation into Montoro's access to "confidential" taxpayer data and, in some cases, its dissemination. The former Popular Party minister under José María Aznar, enmity for years with Montoro, has appealed the Tarragona judge's decision not to allow him to appear in the proceedings and considers this type of transfer of files between former high-ranking officials to be "clearly criminal." Former Podemos founder Juan Carlos Monedero and former Liga president Javier Tebas have also attempted this practice, both of whom are on the list of victims, claiming it is intended to tarnish their public image.