The National Court has been investigating for months the spread of hoaxes and allegedly false accusations by former magistrate Fernando Presencia and far-right Santiago Royuela against prosecutors, magistrates and politicians. Recently the criminal court has taken action on the matter and has endorsed the decision to open the investigation against Presencia and his hoaxes, while those investigated have directed their inventions against Joaquim Bosch, magistrate of Judges and Judges for Democracy. After falsely attributing to him for weeks the possession of bank accounts in tax havens, they have now attributed more of these false accounts to him with an alleged “wife” who is also invented by the accused.
Royuela File: a prevaricating judge and a far-rightist tell you what nobody wants you to know
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Judge Fernando Presencia, former dean of Talavera de la Reina, was expelled from the judicial career after being convicted and disqualified twice for prevarication for having tried to favor friends and acquaintances in different cases processed in his court in the city of Toledo. For years he has denounced being the victim of persecution by his former colleagues in the judiciary, by certain politicians, as well as by members of the General Council of the Judiciary. And in recent times it has joined forces with the far-right Alberto and Santiago Royuela, father and son, channeling some of their complaints and documents known as the ‘Royuela File’, accusing without evidence all kinds of public figures of having bank accounts hidden or, directly, to participate in a network of large-scale murders.
One of the magistrates of Court 6 of the National Court, Joaquín Gadea, finally opened proceedings last June after a complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office and has since investigated the massive dissemination of this false information by Presencia and Royuela about magistrates, prosecutors and politicians. for possible crimes of libel or slander and another one against the high institutions of the State. The judge also ordered the closure of the web page of his association ACODAP and commissioned an analysis of the donations that he supposedly receives from his followers to fight against the corruption that he denounces.
In his latest battery of complaints and press releases, Presencia has charged against practically the entire criminal chamber of the Supreme Court – which has to make a decision on a prison sentence for the former magistrate – as well as against Judge Gadea who is investigating him and , above all, against former Attorney General Dolores Delgado and former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The latter are accused not only of having hidden money in tax havens, but of participating in a network of murderers who have secretly killed hundreds of people for years. The evidence they present is always the same: bank statements and handwritten notes of unknown provenance.
Presencia appealed before the criminal chamber of the National High Court the decision to open a case against him after the complaints of the Prosecutor’s Office and the magistrates of the Supreme Court, and the magistrates have just rejected the appeal. After analyzing the documentation, the magistrates highlight the “full compliance with legality” of the proceedings against him and reject all his arguments: that his freedom of expression and the regulations on whistleblowers of corruption are violated, that the precautionary measures that weigh on his association are null and, finally, that in any case the cause must be studied by the civil jurisdiction and not by the criminal one.
In recent weeks, different people affected by these press releases, complaints and communications –which are now being disseminated, above all, through different Telegram channels– have appeared as potentially harmed in this case, targeting both Fernando Presencia and his association as to the distribution channel of the documents that supposedly come from Santiago Royuela. A Santiago Royuela who, according to sources in the case, has not yet appeared before Judge Gadea: as explained himself on his YouTube channel, has gone to Lebanon, a country with which Spain has no extradition agreement. “In exile and protecting myself from the terrorist narco-cell that wants to prosecute us in the National High Court,” he explained.
One of his latest targets has been Judge Joaquim Bosch Grau. With great media exposure and a progressive profile associated, among other things, with the association Judges and Judges for Democracy to which he belongs and of which he has been a spokesperson at the national level, Bosch has appeared in the open case at the National High Court to demand responsibility for these statements that, among other things, falsely and without any information attribute a bank account abroad. They also attribute it jointly with a partner that does not exist either.
Corruption Whistleblower
For more than a year, Fernando Presencia and his Association Against Corruption and in Defense of Public Action (ACODAP) have filed complaints and issued communications alerting both the discovery of foreign bank accounts of public figures that, as a general rule, they have harmed in the past, as well as the alleged belonging of jurists such as José María Mena or Dolores Delgado to a group of murderers responsible for hundreds of clandestine deaths in Spain.
It does so through this association, now investigated by the National High Court, and they allege that it is a protected corruption complaint action, among other things by the 2019 european directive that calls to defend the ‘whistleblowers’ or denouncers of corruption.
For the National High Court, this directive “is also not applicable to the case” since, it understands, precisely through this investigation “the allegedly typical behavior of the accused will be discovered or not, without it being considered as a “warning” start of cases of corruption”.
