His intervention on TVE had already exceeded half an hour and Pedro Sánchez got so carried away that he made a ‘slip’. He revealed that the judicial investigation has expanded its accounting requirements to the party. “They have now asked us for the donations,” stated the socialist leader without the National Court having made it public.
The head of the Executive is not usually prone to announcing judicial initiatives about his party and it is not appropriate for him to do so either, but the episode shows that Sánchez also acts as secretary general of the PSOE and spends time knowing in detail what kind of information the judges are requesting.
The judge’s move is logical after giving credibility to the testimony of Víctor de Aldama that a Venezuelan payment and payments from construction companies to the party in power were disguised through a striking fever of donations to Ferraz in the middle of the pandemic.
As this newspaper already published last April, the PSOE admits that it received a record amount of private donations in 2020, which is a legal form of party financing as long as each donor does not exceed 50,000 euros. It received 837,506 euros in 2020, according to the official information provided by the PSOE to the Court of Auditors, a record in the ‘Sánchez era’ precisely in the year when it was more difficult to raise funds. The PSOE’s argument is that such a record was due to a successful campaign by the party among its supporters to raise funds to research a vaccine against the pandemic and that the money was transferred to the Carlos III Institute.
Aldama stated before the Supreme Court that he himself was the vehicle for the “peak of donations” the party received and that it was Koldo García who told him that a system of allocations to trusted people would be set up to channel the money in the form of donations taking advantage of the legal route of donor structuring. Sánchez insisted on TVE that Aldama should not be given credibility and socialist sources suggest that he knew from the Court of Auditors’ report corresponding to 2020 – published in June 2024 – that more donations than usual had been made that year. And that he took advantage of that data to “create a lie.”
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Justice will decide, but there is a surprising element in the official version. If that campaign was so positive, it is striking that Ferraz has not wanted to repeat it in subsequent years – with a better economic situation – for this same or other noble causes. That campaign, started on April 5, 2020, in the middle of the state of emergency in Spain, was called “socialist heart” and was “directed at militants, officials and the structure” of the PSOE. However, “many people who, without being militants of the PSOE, their progressive ideals along with the values of solidarity and social justice, have decided that this was their cause, which is the cause of all Spanish and global society,” explained then the manager at the time, Mariano Moreno Pavón.
Aldama claimed that he made payments destined for the PSOE between late 2019 and early 2020 and Ferraz assures that it can prove that it transferred money to the Carlos III Institute. The judicial investigation analyzes whether there was not only irregular financing but also money laundering and does not let go of the bone thrown by Aldama that the PSOE and the Socialist International could have benefited from a dark fictitious contract with Apamate Corporate&Trust, the company of the chavista Francisco Flores connected to Delcy Rodríguez, which is the same one that hired the protégé of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
Sánchez is adamant that there is no such irregular financing of the party and lamented that the PSOE “has done a striptease like the PP has never been asked to do.” The socialist leader is right that his political force has provided more public data of its accounts in recent years than the rest of the parties and that the judicial requests to Ferraz are being exhaustive, but past experience precisely dictates that the black boxes never appear in the official information nor in the reports of the Court of Auditors.
“I don’t know if they will charge us or not,” conceded the secretary general of the PSOE on TVE. And that doubt did not seem like a slip.
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