The National Court orders García Castellón to file his secret and “prospective” investigation against Podemos

The judges of the Third Section consider an appeal from the Prosecutor’s Office in this regard and another from the Public Ministry that asked to annul the proceedings that García Castellón had ordered to the Police, despite the warnings that the higher instance had already transferred to the magistrate, considering them clearly prospective.

The magistrates of the Third Section, chaired by Alfonso Guevara, had already ruled in this regard in a forceful previous order in which they left the door open for García Castellón to try to find out if the statements of ‘Pollo’ Carvajal and two other people who had been granted protected witness status by the judge could be truthful. It was the loophole that García Castellón used to reorder an investigation in the same sense that he had already been warned that he was prohibited from undertaking.

In this regard, the judges of the Third Section refer, who consider that the head of the Investigating Court number 6, Manuel García Castellón, “artificially expands” his “prospective” investigation to try to circumvent the legal limits.

According to the postulates of the Prosecutor’s Office, which he reported on Friday elDiario.esthe judges warn that the judge intended to invade fundamental rights, tracking bank income of natural and legal persons, or the displacements of Juan Carlos Monedero to Venezuela, without appearing any of those cited as being investigated in the case.

Proceedings 79/2016 were opened as a result of a complaint based on press clippings from the PISA report, prepared by the PP political brigade and whose content had already been disregarded by the Supreme Court, which led to its immediate filing. The crime investigated was the alleged irregular financing of Podemos and five years later García Castellón fit in the statements of ‘Pollo’ Carvajal. However, the people that García Castellón has been investigating, founders of Podemos such as Juan Carlos Monedero, Jorge Lago, Carolina Bescansa and Ariel Jerez, are “unrelated” to that reopened investigation and the events that it traces, prior to the creation of the party, concludes the Criminal Chamber.

Usurps the functions of the Court of Accounts

But it is also that, according to what is now resolved by the higher instance, García Castellón has tried to usurp the functions of the Court of Auditors, wanting to control the financing of a political party. The facts in which he searched, they remind him, are prior to the existence of the crime of irregular financing in the Spanish Penal Code.

García Castellón insisted on demonstrating the alleged irregular financing of Podemos based on the statements of ‘Pollo’ Carvajal after being arrested in Madrid in September 2021 for the purpose of being extradited to the United States, which claims him for crimes that in Spain are equivalent to belonging a criminal organization or collaboration with a terrorist organization and drug trafficking in its aggravated form. The Third Section warns that the complaints against Podemos de Carvajal pursue the “spurious purpose” of avoiding his extradition, according to the sources familiar with the order.

The investigating judge has insisted over and over again on some testimonies that the Court has already considered “third-party narratives”, as reported elDiario.es. In this last order of the Third Section, the testimony of a protected witness insists that Monedero received a million dollars at the Venezuelan Embassy in Spain from a high-ranking official of the Latin American country with the only certainty that in the summer of 2017 he traveled to Spain. ‘Pollo’ Carvajal also says that it was like that, that he brought the money through a diplomatic bag, but he specifies that he knows all that because the protected witness cited has told him so.

The judges of the Third Section insist to García Castellón that he cannot investigate the alleged illegal financing of Podemos in the case that they order to file provisionally and that if he has evidence of economic crimes or falsehoods, he must deduct testimony in case another case can be opened.