The Tax Agency (AEAT) provided tax data of political adversaries to Cristóbal Montoro’s team during his time in the Ministry of Finance. According to the investigation opened by Court number 2 of Tarragona, confidential information on taxpayers would have been sent to the political officials of the Treasury from the top of the treasury. Now it is being analyzed whether there could be any illegality in this.
In the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office itself, two theses are being considered: the first is that the transfer of information from the Agency to the Treasury, if there is a justified interest, cannot be the subject of criminal reproach while another sector considers that the tax data is confidential and its filtration outside the AEAT is an irregularity or even illegality.
In fact, this debate was exposed in the meeting that took place at the Anti-Corruption prosecutors’ board convened at the request of the prosecutor in the case due to the reluctance of her superiors to extend the investigation opened by the Investigative Court number 2 of Tarragona to the tax office. Economic Team that Montoro founded and that was later left in the hands of former officials from both the AEAT and the Treasury.
Some names that are coming up in the case, according to several sources familiar with the matter, would be the former minister and former president of Bankia Rodrigo Rato or the former Madrid president Esperanza Aguirre, among others. Both turn out to be from the same party that was in Government at that time. However, there were various reasons for this information to be leaked, some of which ended up being published in the media.
Both Rato and Aguirre have already publicly expressed their suspicions about the Treasury. At that time, Rato had become an uncomfortable person for the party. His name had been splashed by the Caja Madrid black card scandal. After that episode, the Tax Agency (AEAT) launched an inspection against him where an allegedly undeclared fortune abroad would emerge. In his case, one day before the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF) registered his home with judicial authorization on May 16, 2015, through a Court on duty, it was leaked that he had taken advantage of the amnesty. fiscal, precisely promoted by Montoro himself. The next day, the then Minister of Justice Rafael Catalá gave public explanations about the operation.
Rato himself has reported in the Court that is investigating him for the alleged fraud due to his hidden fortune that the AEAT opened a “general case” against him and has even gone so far as to request, without success, that Catalá and the former director general of the Santiago Menéndez Agency for its public statements regarding the investigations regarding him.
The matter of Aguirre – at that time a political rival of the PP leader Mariano Rajoy – is from the same year, 2015. A couple of days before the municipal elections were held in which he aspired to win the Mayor’s Office of Madrid, eldiario. It was published that the popular candidate and her husband deposited a check for five million euros that corresponded to the sale of a Goya painting. At that moment Aguirre pointed to Montoro’s surroundings. These names are joined by some others, as well as the transfer of information on journalists’ tax data, such as an ABC editor who was inspected.
