The complaint of the former lawyer of We can, Monica Carmona, delivered to the court investigating the Neuron case it casts new suspicions about the party’s internal activity. Throughout 2019, Carmona, in charge of reviewing the regulatory compliance of the training, received a complaint of an alleged payment of 300.000 euros that, through the foundation of Podemos, was going to “Political training courses” without leaving any trace. The lawyer began an internal investigation suspecting that it was a “front”. But she was fired.
The courses that the lawyer was investigating were linked to the project “Paulo Freire Popular School” that was held in 2018 and 2019. This initiative depended on the Civil Society Secretariat, led by the deputy Rafa Mayoral. The school intended to offer “political training courses”, according to the letter that the former Podemos lawyer has sent to the judge Juan Jose Escalonilla. But the sum of money and the fear that it could be a case of “diversion of funds” led him to become suspicious.
“The investigation into the donations to the Paulo Freire Popular School began as a result of the internal complaint that a large amount of money had been donated for training events through the Podemos Instituto 25-M foundation, without there being due transparency on the actual destination of said funds, which added to the suspicion that they had actually been used as’cover ‘to divert money from the party, taking into account the high cost of the project in relation to the service actually provided ”, reveals the lawyer’s complaint.
“Fraudulent diversion of funds”
For Carmona, the lack of internal transparency translated into a problem to clarify the legality of the operation: “It is a notorious fact that the holding of training courses has been used as a mechanism for the diversion of funds. From there my suspicions that Podemos training courses could be used fraudulently”, He states in his letter sent to Court number 42 of Madrid.
The alarms went off because the complaint received pointed to a network that included another project that was being investigated. It was known as # 404 Popular communication, who had received 50,000 euros from the purple party in circumstances that Carmona considered unclear.
“We received a confidential message with this literal:”The Popular School has been given almost € 300,000 between the match and the GP [grupo político del Congreso]”. Therefore, in the face of such a high amount for a small-scale training project, we proceeded to collect information on the operation of this project and its financial resources, reaching the conclusion that transparency was lacking in the project and that had to be investigated in depth, especially because of its links with other projects, such as # 404 Popular Communication and the Vamos! project.
The attorney’s investigation, however, had to be stopped due to her sudden cessation at the end of 2019. At the time, Carmona was discussing with another attorney, José Manuel Calvente, other party contracts, such as that of the firm Neurona, which advised Podemos in the electoral campaign that year and which is now being investigated for embezzlement.
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Microcredits and payments to the foundation
Carmona and Calvente began to pull the thread, until they tried to look closely at the financing of the electoral campaign through microcredits. But they were dismissed: “It was impossible for me to investigate in depth due to my dismissal,” Carmona explains to Judge Escalonilla. It should be noted, as this newspaper published, that Podemos recorded in its 2019 account a record number of microcredits (3.6 million euros) months before collecting them and that it served to finance its electoral campaign before.
With the internal complaint of a payment of 300,000 euros for the Freire School courses, Carmona also wanted to clarify another supposed payment of 200,000 euros for the foundation of Podemos Institute for Democracy 25-M, which he considers “for poorly defined purposes.” Podemos had to face a difficult electoral campaign and that disbursement caught the lawyer’s attention: “I was personally surprised by this request for funds so elevated of the foundation right at the beginning of an electoral process and when the finance team demanded a containment of the expenses ”.
The lawyer had access to a draft contract between the party and the purple foundation. But when he was analyzing the document, the Citizen Council of Podemos decided his immediate cessation. “The electoral processes of 2019 and my dismissal prevented me from deepening this line of investigation,” he accuses. After entering the Government, Pablo Iglesias handed control of said entity to Juan Carlos Monedero, who had brought the consultant Neurona to Spain.
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Carmona thus denounces the Party “opacity” in matters such as the payments to its foundation and the management of the money of the procedural costs that, as it exclusively revealed VozpópuliThey can involve Iglesias himself. Carmona tried to prevent the party or its leaders from incurring any legality. But he feared that the silence of the management would end up making it responsible for possible irregularities.
The letter to Iglesias
In fact, the lawyer provides the judge with a letter in which, as this newspaper revealed a year ago, she warned the secretary general about the problems detected. In that letter, he also urged Iglesias to reinstate the lawyer Calvente, “allowing the ongoing internal investigations to individualize the responsibilities that may arise from these acts, protecting the party as such.” “This message was read by its recipient Pablo Iglesias after two hours, but I did not receive any response”He writes in his complaint.
After the silence of the secretary general, he called the leader Ione Belarra and sent the letter to all the members of the Executive. Carmona sent his message on December 4, 2019, according to his version of events, and received a reply eight days later: “The only response I got was on December 12, 2019 when I received a burofax of Podemos communicating to me that they were ceasing me in my position as Head of Regulatory Compliance and they required me to cease any activity related to my duties ”.
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