MADRID, Spain – Plus Ultra informed the State Industrial Participation Company in advance that both the oil company controlled by the Venezuelan government, PDVSA, and the companies of Dutch financier Simon Verhoeven would benefit from the granting of the 53-million-euro bailout approved by the Council of Ministers in 2021. This is indicated by the documentation provided by the airline’s former CEO Roberto Roselli to the court led by José Luis Calama, which is investigating the alleged influence-peddling network in which the main suspect is former Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
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Roselli’s defence has handed the magistrate more than 600 pages that include, among other things, the former CEO’s communications with José Ángel Partearroyo, director of SEPI Holdings. Although Roselli himself warns that the bulk of his communications were carried out via WhatsApp and are already in the case file, dozens of emails show in detail how the granting of that multimillion-euro loan was orchestrated. A loan that is under suspicion for two reasons: there are indications that Zapatero took advantage of his influence in Pedro Sánchez’s government to secure the awarding of the aid, and others that suggest the bailout money was introduced into an international money-laundering network. The SEPI official José Ángel Partearroyo has been summoned as a witness to testify on 19 November.
Among the documents handed over by Roselli, to which 20minutos has had access, one email stands out that Partearroyo sent him on 26 November 2020, just over a hundred days before the approval of the aid. In that email, the director of Holdings asked the CEO for the data of the company’s main creditors, for the conflict of interest. What Partearroyo was requesting was the list of companies to which Plus Ultra was indebted. Roselli forwarded a list of the top 20 by volume of business, headed by the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA, with the debt in that case amounting to 4,694,926 euros. The company itself admitted that it was high, since PDVSA supplies fuel but cannot collect until it resolves its situation with OFAC, the US Treasury Department agency that maintained commercial sanctions on the oil company.
After receiving the list, the SEPI director of Holdings asked whether these companies were creditors with whom they had relevant debt that could benefit indirectly from the potential granting of temporary public support, specifying that the conflict would be with those with relevant pending debts. Aside from this email, the stack of documentation provided by Roberto Roselli also includes the pages of the final contract that was notarised, where the detail of the debt that was definitively approved by SEPI for payment appears. As explained by the former CEO’s defence lawyer, those pages informed that Plus Ultra would prioritise payment to several companies that had granted the airline various bridge loans, namely the companies of Dutch financier Simon Verhoeven, investigated by Judge Calama as the alleged ringleader of an international money-laundering network.
Plus Ultra informó a la SEPI de que el rescate serviría para pagar a la petrolera del régimen chavista y empresas de la trama de blanqueo | Por @PBAlbornoz https://t.co/5JlOZnWtle
— 20minutos.es (@20m) September 26, 2026
The magistrate’s thesis is that, by returning that money to Verhoeven’s companies, Plus Ultra was contributing to laundering money of illicit origin, with the airline introducing the lawful money lent by SEPI into the laundering circle managed by Simon Verhoeven. This Dutch citizen appeared before Calama on Friday but refused to testify, alleging that he needs time to prepare his defence with his lawyer Paula Rodríguez. According to legal sources, Verhoeven stated that within around 15 days he will be in a position to answer the interrogation.
Plus Ultra’s contractual relations with Verhoeven date back to 2019, when one of the Dutchman’s companies, Valerian, granted the airline two loans. Plus Ultra issued debt bonds and Valerian, by buying them, injected liquidity worth 769,000 euros. In turn, Plus Ultra and Leendert Verhoeven’s company signed debt securitisation contracts in favour of a Luxembourg company called Modus Securistation. Under that contract, Plus Ultra stopped owing the money to Verhoeven’s company, since Modus bought the debt to then sell it to different investors through securities called Credit Linked Notes. In this way, the money that had initially come from the company of the alleged ringleader of a money-laundering network would end up in the hands of those who acquired the Credit Linked Notes from Modus Securistation, making the traceability of the funds more difficult. As stated in the documentation accessed by this newspaper, Plus Ultra informed SEPI in November 2020 of the debt it held at that time with Modus, amounting to 522,740 euros, and which it would repay once rescued by the government.
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Aside from these operations, there are others under the spotlight of the National High Court, namely several bridge loans that Verhoeven made to Plus Ultra through different companies: Wailea Invest LRD, Valerian and Allpa Wira Trading UK. The three loans were made from October 2020, when Plus Ultra was already managing the processing of the bailout, and in total they add up to 1.9 million euros. According to the documentation provided by Roselli, the detail of the debt that was definitively approved by SEPI for payment included all these bridge loans, meaning the State Industrial Participation Company knew in advance that part of the bailout money would end up in the hands of these companies being investigated in Spain as well as in Switzerland and France as part of a large money-laundering network.
