The Mossos d’Esquadra were the ones who pilloried the team of former Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro after finding some suspicious emails from the office he founded, the Economic Team. An exchange of e-mails that glimpsed a power of influence at the core of the ministry that alerted the agents, who immediately after contacted the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.
That discovery occurred in 2017. It was a kind of carom. The origin of the chain of coincidences that the Mossos have been able to weave is in a record of the City Council of El Morell (Tarragona) in 2016. There the agents of the criminal investigation police station were after the granting of suspicious urban planning licenses.
But among all the seized documentation, the suspicion arose that the companies Messer Ibérica and Carburos Metálicos SA allegedly fraudulently shared an electric meter for both. By presenting themselves as a single company, they had a cheaper energy rate than the competition. With these indications, the Mossos searched the headquarters of Messer Ibérica a year later, on November 6, 2017.
It was there where the “chance finding” occurred, as stated in a document from the Provincial Court of Tarragona, of some suspicious emails from 2013 that would serve to open a new piece that remains secret. It is here that the plot is investigated “whose purpose would be no other” than to intervene and influence favorable legislative reforms for the gas companies included in the Association of Industrial and Medicinal Gas Manufacturers (Aggim). Messer Ibérica, as stated on the Aggim website, is part of the association.
That search at the companies’ headquarters led to the intervention of the emails of their top representatives, who three years later ended up arrested in an operation against electrical fraud.
However, the agents, who at that time were led by Mayor Toni Rodríguez –now purged by the current Ministry of the Interior–, paid attention to a post office crossing with the Economic Team. The crux of the emails was an attempt by the companies to have the office intervene directly in the Treasury to modify a law that would reduce a tax that was affecting their profits.
At the time of the discovery, it had just been announced that Anti-Corruption had filed a complaint against this same firm, previously called Montoro Asociados, for the allegedly irregular awarding of a contract with the Madrid Chambers of Commerce in 2012. Among the defendants were a brother of the former minister, Ricardo, and the former president of the Superior Council of Chambers, Manuel Teruel. That matter ended up in court number 22 in Madrid, which after doing some investigations decided to archive the case.
The facts detected by the Mossos revealed a modus operandi similar to that reflected in the first complaint by the Prosecutor’s Office. The first sieve was to be able to differentiate the fine line between lobbying work and influence peddling.
These emails served to trigger an anonymous complaint filed months before, but which was at an impasse. This same investigative team had an anonymous complaint from March 24, 2017, in which it alerted of the alleged influence on the Treasury leadership by companies that had previously paid the Economic Team.
At that time, Anti-Corruption promoted an investigation with the Mossos and the Civil Guard, which resulted in a complaint and opening of proceedings in the investigating court 2 of Tarragona, as it was the Morell City Council that initiated the investigation. The matter has been prosecuted since 2018. According to various records of the Provincial Court of Tarragona, the investigator maintains the secret of the summary with the criterion against the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, as he still has pending proceedings to carry out.
Likewise, from these resolutions it is also clear that the judge wanted to go beyond the prosecutor Carmen García Cerdá, despite the fact that she was the one who promoted the investigation. This is demonstrated in the appeal he filed against the magistrate’s decision to intercept the communications of several investigators in the case linked to Equipo Economico.
In this case, the Court agreed with the Prosecutor’s Office, considering that the evidence contained in the case did not yet have too much weight to carry out wiretapping. However, as La Vanguardia has learned, there is a disparity of opinion between the prosecutor in the case and the chief Anti-Corruption prosecutor, Alejando Luzón, who is betting on containment of part of the case.
