From putting Mario Conde – president of one of the big banks, investor and friend of Pedro J. Ramírez and lender to King Juan Carlos, no less – in preventive detention to ending his judicial career by making a beginner’s mistake and being forced to close the Tsunami case with which he intended to prevent the application of the amnesty law. Manuel García Castellón’s career has been long and controversial, which is what one can aspire to in the National Court, but it has been the last few years that have marked his career. Few judges, if anything a handful, have intervened in political matters with such intensity as he has.
He did what he could and the Popular Party will never forget him.
On Monday, the BOE published his forced retirement a few months before his 72nd birthday. He could not have obtained another extension. There is no doubt that he dealt with cases of great political importance and that his decisions pleased the PP or left it very relieved. Without García Castellón, everything would have been worse for the party. Nor can it be denied that the magistrate benefited.
After his first stint at the National Court, which lasted five years, he won one of the big prizes of his career. The Government of José María Aznar sent him to Paris as a liaison judge with the French authorities. A bargain, like being the bishop of Mondoñedo. Little work and a great salary. Currently, that position has an annual salary of 130,000 euros. To be clear, it is a little more than The 127,000 euros that presidents earn of the Supreme Court chamber and the 124,000 euros of the magistrates of that court, what we could call the judicial elite.
Mariano Rajoy’s government did its part. Without anyone knowing his language skills, he went from Paris to Rome. In total, 17 years outside Spain. All good things come to an end. He had to return to his old post, where judicial instructions that directly affected the PP could have a great political impact and –this is the most important thing– the substitute judge was making the party nervous. García Castellón was forced to put an end to his ‘holiday in Rome’.
The Púnica and Lezo cases targeted the highest-ranking members of the party leadership in Madrid. Four former Madrid presidents were charged: Esperanza Aguirre, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, Cristina Cifuentes and Ignacio González. Only the latter was prosecuted. His trial has not yet been held in one of those areas that are characteristic of Spanish justice: cases drag on in court when there is little else to investigate. By the time the trial is held, the immediate political effects are more than diluted.
Some of the statements made by the anti-corruption prosecutors made clear the judge’s modus operandi. It is never too late to change one’s mind. His decisions were “contradictory to all the precedents that I had previously assessed as existing and solid regarding these corruption payments,” they said on one occasion. In this way, a corruption case loses its layers and is left naked.
The list of thanks for her decisions is long and María Dolores Cospedal figures in particular on it. The audio recordings of her numerous meetings with Commissioner Villarejo revealed that both had business relations – Cospedal’s husband asked the police officer to be “cheap” because “we are broke” – which placed the PP’s general secretary in a delicate position. Only in theory, because García Castellón did not see it as suspicious. In the end, Cospedal denied any payment. “No money was ever paid” to Villarejo, she said. How could the judge not believe her?
Regarding the possibility that Rajoy and Cospedal might be implicated in the Kitchen case, the anti-corruption prosecutors complained that García Castellón had established an insurmountable barrier: “There is a resounding refusal to continue investigating in that direction, as if a cordon or unacceptable red line had been established that could not be crossed in the investigation.” More than a cordon or line, it was a real wall.
With Podemos, there were not so many considerations, rather the opposite. A complaint from an advisor to Pablo Iglesias that her mobile phone had been stolen was conveniently digested by the judge and turned into an investigation into the leader of Podemos himself until the Criminal Division of the National Court ordered him to stop. Which he did not do.
Its main objective was to implicate the party in secret payments from Venezuela. The mechanics were repeated frequently. The instruction was secret, but that did not prevent it from being leaked to various media outlets where it appeared in the form of alarming headlines or valuable minutes of television.
In the judicial arena, everything came to nothing. Two years of investigation without any defendants or trials, where it was possible for the judge to order the police to investigate bank accounts of people who were not even being investigated. If anyone thinks that it was a prospective investigation, which would be illegal, there is no need to cross oneself in the face of such audacity, because that was precisely what the Criminal Division of the National Court ended up saying.
When Aznar said that “whoever can do it, let it be done”, in reality García Castellón had already been doing it for a long time. thingsHis finale lived up to expectations. The Tsunami investigation and the protests against the verdict in the trial of the independence process became one of the biggest obstacles to the application of the amnesty law. After several years of investigation, García Castellón suddenly discovered that he was facing a case of terrorism, which meant that Carles Puigdemont would be left without amnesty.
That was where García Castellón’s court crashed into a wall while driving at top speed. The National Court annulled its entire investigation since July 2021 because the judge had extended the investigation of the case beyond the permitted time limit. The magistrate had to throw in the towel, but not before leaving the flag hanging over the trench he had to abandon. He stated in the order to file the case that the annulled proceedings “pointed unequivocally to the commission of acts that could be classified as a terrorist crime.”
It was like toasting the sun or spitting in the wind, but at least it would serve to feed the editorials of those grateful for García Castellón’s support for their ideological cause.
Their work has been invaluable in the most literal sense of the term. There is no money to pay for so many services to the Popular Party and it would also be totally illegal. The opponents of the PP always had a target painted on their chests as they entered court number six of the National Court.
Maybe it was all a coincidence, maybe he was a very bad judge or maybe we have to look for the explanation in the words of the judge himself to understand his actions after his return to Spain. “Why do they say ‘lawfare’ when they are accusing the judges of prevarication?”
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