Zapatero demands to stop Judge Calama's "letter of marque" and remove the investigation into Bolivia from the 'Plus Ultra case'

The former President of the Government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has appealed to the Criminal Chamber of the Audiencia Nacional to try to exclude the UDEF report on his professional activities in Bolivia from the 'Plus Ultra case'. The defense accuses Judge José Luis Calama of allowing an unlimited investigation into the former president's economic life.

The appeal questions the police report that attributes to Zapatero the collection of 200,000 euros from Focus Social Research, a Peruvian consultancy firm related to Grupo Gloria. The UDEF believes that these payments could have concealed efforts before the Bolivian Government to favor the business conglomerate in a dispute over a sanction of 107 million dollars.

The police thesis holds that the former president contacted high authorities in Bolivia, including then-president Luis Arce. Zapatero maintains that the money corresponded to legal consulting, advisory, and international mediation work. The UDEF's suspicions remain under investigation and have not yet been accredited by a sentence.

Five years of banking movements under scrutiny

The defense denounces that investigators performed a massive dump of the information obtained during the searches and examined 174 transfers from eleven payers over five years. In their opinion, the authorization to access emails, conversations, private documents, and banking data linked to the case did not allow for the analysis of all the former president's professional and personal activity.

The lawyers acknowledge that an information seizure can hardly be done "surgically," but they reject that this grants freedom to review the material "in any way and without any perimeter." The appeal speaks of a "letter of marque" and a general investigation prohibited by law, legally known as 'inquisitio generalis'.

Judge Calama already rejected this approach. As 'ElConstitucional.es' published last July, the investigating judge understands that the transfers appeared when analyzing material legally incorporated into the procedure and that their possible relevance required investigating them.

Calama maintains that the perimeter of a case can be expanded when authorized investigations uncover new facts with the appearance of a crime. The defense replies that, when the report was prepared, Focus Social Research and the efforts in Bolivia were outside the investigated facts and there was no prior suspicion to justify reviewing those payments.

The Criminal Chamber will have the next word

The Criminal Chamber must now decide whether to confirm Calama's resolution or remove the police report from the proceedings. Its decision will focus on determining whether the UDEF respected the limits of the original investigation and the guarantees regarding Zapatero's economic privacy, without yet resolving whether the payments from Peru were legal or concealed an intermediation.

If the appeal is rejected, the Focus transfers and the efforts made in Bolivia will continue within the procedure. An estimation would force the withdrawal of the questioned report and would weaken this specific ramification. The filing of the appeal, by itself, does not paralyze the rest of the investigations of the 'Plus Ultra case'.

The main case investigates possible crimes related to the public rescue of 53 million euros granted to Plus Ultra in 2021. Two former airline officials have recently declared that a 1% commission was agreed with the so-called "Zapatero group" if the aid was obtained, although none has specified what actions the former president would have taken before the Government. Zapatero denies having intervened in the granting of the loan or having collected a commission for the rescue.