The Tax Agency (AEAT) provided fiscal data of political opponents to Cristóbal Montoro’s team during his time at the Ministry of Finance. According to the investigation opened by the court number 2 of Tarragona, confidential taxpayer information would have been sent from the head of the tax office to the political positions of the Treasury. It is now being analyzed whether there could have been any illegality in this.
The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office studies two theses: 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 charges, while another sector considers that tax data they are confidential and leaking them outside the AEAT is an irregularity or even an illegality.
In fact, this debate was exposed in the meeting that was held at the board of prosecutors of Anticorruption convened at the request of the prosecutor of the case, following the reluctance of his superiors to expand the investigation opened by the court of inquiry number 2 in Tarragona at the Equipo Económico tax office that Montoro founded and which was later in the hands of former officials, both from the AEAT and the Treasury.
Some names that are emerging in the case, according to several sources familiar with the matter, would be those of the former minister and ex-president of Bankia Rodrigo Rato or the ex-president of Madrid Esperanza Aguirre, among others. Both are from the same party that was in government at the time. However, there were several reasons for that information to be leaked, and some of it ended up being published in the media.
Both Rato and Aguirre already publicly exposed their suspicions about the Treasury. At that time, Rato had become an uncomfortable person for the party. His name had been splashed by the scandal of Caja Madrid’s opaque cards. After that episode, the Tax Agency (AEAT) launched an inspection against him in which an allegedly undeclared fortune appeared abroad. In his case, one day before the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF) searched his home with judicial authorization on May 16, 2015, through a guard court, it was leaked that had welcomed the tax amnesty, precisely driven by Montoro himself. The following day, the then Minister of Justice Rafael Catalá gave public explanations about the operation.
Rato himself has reported to the court that is investigating him for the alleged fraud for his hidden fortune that the AEAT opened a “general case” against him and has even gone so far as to request, without success, that he testify as witnesses Catalá and the former director general of the Santiago Menéndez Agency for his public statements about the investigations that he is responsible for.
The affair of Aguirre – at that time a political rival of the leader of the PP Mariano Rajoy – dates back to the same year, 2015. A couple of days before the municipal elections were held in which he aspired to become mayor 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 painting by Goya. Aguirre pointed to Montoro’s surroundings at that moment. To these names is added a few others, and also the transfer of information on the fiscal data of journalists, such as an ABC editor who came to be inspected.
