MADRID, Spain – National High Court judge Santiago Pedraz has rejected the PP’s request to indict the PSOE in the case of the alleged dirty operations network, ruling on Friday that there is no “prima facie evidence” that “reasonably supports” attributing criminal conduct to the Socialist Party. He added that before deciding on the eventual indictment of the party, “certain measures” must be carried out, some of which have already been agreed and are under way, while others, such as the summons of Santos Cerdán as an investigated person, will be agreed later, as Pedraz’s ruling anticipates.
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The National High Court magistrate explained that indicting a legal person requires five conditions to be met. The first is the commission of an offence capable of generating criminal liability for the legal person, and among the list of such offences attributable to organisations, companies or political parties are two to which the Prosecutor’s Office points, bribery and influence peddling, though that institution also sees the request to indict the PSOE as premature. The second circumstance is that the perpetrator of the offence must be a legal representative of the legal person or someone with organisational and control powers within it. In addition, the act must have been committed in the name or on behalf of the legal person and for its direct or indirect benefit. Finally, the indictment cannot be made unless it is shown that control and supervision measures to prevent the offence were not implemented.
After this brief exposition, Pedraz’s order sets out the questions that must be investigated to determine the possible indictment of the PSOE: what real powers Santos Cerdán had within the party structure, who authorised and executed the payments under investigation, what internal controls existed, whether there were relevant failures in supervision mechanisms, and whether the party obtained any benefit from the conduct under investigation.
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At this moment “what is being called prima facie evidence” to indict the PSOE is not accredited, the judge said, specifying that this prima facie evidence is the antechamber of indications, then rational indications of criminality and after that proof, requiring a piece of data, element or objective source providing minimal support for the reality of the asserted fact. The judge therefore considers that several measures must be completed, such as analysis of the banking documentation requested from the PSOE, of documents seized at Ferraz headquarters and of those seized at Santos Cerdán’s home. It must also be established whether there were internal alerts within the PSOE about the payments to the alleged dirty operations and, if so, how they were handled. Once all these investigations have been carried out, a decision can then be made, Pedraz concluded, adding in the final lines of his ruling that Cerdán’s statement will not take place until all the previously mentioned inquiries have been carried out.
