The defense strategy of businessman Julio Martínez Martínez has become a new headache for José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The friend and alleged frontman of the former Spanish government president has put it into practice this week, advised by lawyer María Dolores Márquez de Prado. It is with whom he was accompanied this Tuesday when he appeared as an investigated party at the National Court, a scenario that Márquez de Prado knows very well. This renowned criminal lawyer worked as a prosecutor there for seventeen years. A period in which she earned the nickname "indomitable." Precisely for being a headache for another former socialist leader, former Spanish president Felipe González during his time in Moncloa.

When on February 21, 2024, the Civil Guard arrested him, Víctor de Aldama was president of Zamora CF and his name had never appeared related to the Spanish government. Two and a half years later, his “active” collaboration in the judicial investigations that tarnish Pedro Sánchez has turned him into a ticking time bomb for the PSOE. Not only because of the “full and continuous cooperation” with justice that has led to the "condemnation of José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García, but because, boasting of the benefits of stretching the blanket, it has become a path to follow for other people. And it is a weak point of the defense that Moncloa, under José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, puts up. This very week we have had some examples. 

Despite Julio Martínez's change in strategy, which implicates former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the Plus Ultra rescue, Moncloa sticks to its script. In the press conference following yesterday's council of ministers, spokesperson Elma Saiz defended the credit granted to the airline during the pandemic and, furthermore, assured that the Spanish executive "continues to maintain the presumption of innocence" of Zapatero. Saiz did not want to deviate from this: she refused to comment on the statements of Julio Martínez Martínez (alias "Julito") and also of the president of Plus Ultra, Julio Martínez Sola, who point to the former president as a key figure in the rescue, as the National Police does through UDEF, and limited herself to saying that the judicial investigation is in an early stage.

Julio Martínez Martínez has become one of the key figures in the investigation into José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. They both met in 2011, when the former president sold him a house in Almeria, they became friends and got fond of going out running together. The UDEF believes he was his frontman. 24 hours after disrupting Zapatero's defense strategy by assuring that he was the one who “marked the steps to follow” in the Plus Ultra rescue, the businessman has spent four hours testifying before Judge José Luis Calama as a suspect and has fully ratified the confession about the former president's intervention. Despite this, he said he does not know who he influenced or with whom he spoke for the airline to receive public aid. Sources present at the declaration explain to ARA that he recounted that he simply relayed to Zapatero what clients told him, that he did not get involved in the actions he took, and that he did not report to him if he was going to see anyone.

When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in the Koldo case, at the end of June, in which it sentenced former minister and former organization secretary of the PSOE José Luis Ábalos and his advisor Koldo García to heavy prison sentences but benefited the main beneficiary of the mask fraud, Víctor de Aldama, alarm bells already began to ring. The suspension of the four-and-a-half-year prison sentence for the corrupter, replaced by community service, was justified by the businessman's cooperation in uncovering the fraud, which, according to the court, had been crucial in proving the accusations. However, this reward for the corrupter in exchange for denouncing his partners was controversial, firstly because not everyone saw it as justified within the same legal framework, and secondly because it was interpreted as a green light for others to follow the same path. This is precisely what seems to be starting to happen.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero denied a month ago, before the National High Court judge José Luis Calama, having exercised "the slightest influence" in the public rescue of Plus Ultra. The version he has presented, less than a day before testifying before the same magistrate as an investigated party, the businessman Julio Martínez Martínez, considered by investigators to be the "lieutenant" of the former Spanish president in the scheme, calls into question the former socialist leader. In a document sent to the National High Court, Martínez Martínez states that Plus Ultra paid 1% of the rescue amount, which amounted to 53 million euros, as "fees" for Zapatero "acting as an intermediary in obtaining public aid". This money was channeled through a business network in Martínez's name. "In his role as a consultant, Mr. Rodríguez Zapatero was the one who set the steps to follow," he assures regarding the former socialist leader's role in the rescue.

4,079,799.04 euros. This is the amount that Spanish former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero would have taken in five years, from 2020 to 2025, according to the UDEF report, for intervening in the rescue of the airline Plus Ultra and other companies. The receipt of these incomes is one of the two key affidavits that have served as the basis for Judge José Luis Calama to indict, for the first time since the return to democracy, a former head of government.