The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has asked magistrate José Luis Calama, investigating judge of the Audiencia Nacional, to request an extended report on the jewels seized from former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The public prosecutor wants to try to gather more data on when the pieces were set and to delve deeper into their current market price, as reported by El Mundo and confirmed by legal sources to EL PAÍS. Until now, the former PSOE leader has not offered the judge any explanation about the jewels and, during the interview granted this Thursday to TVE, he merely described them as “a personal courtesy gift from many years ago,” without specifying further.
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This move by the Prosecutor’s Office occurred days ago, according to these same sources. Before, therefore, his public appearance on television. Zapatero is not only under suspicion in the Plus Ultra case for allegedly having mediated to facilitate the rescue granted to the airline by the Government during the pandemic. But the judge also decided to open a separate line of investigation into the jewels that the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) found during the search of his office. After the Ansorena house valued these pieces at 1.3 million euros, the magistrate charged him with a tax offense and another of smuggling.
When he testified before Calama on June 17, the former socialist leader invoked his right not to answer questions about the jewels. His defense had asked for more time to gather information. However, to date, he has not yet offered further explanations to the Audiencia Nacional.
In public, he has not gone much further either. His entourage has been assuring for weeks that the value of the jewels is less than that calculated by Ansorena. A thesis that Zapatero repeated in his interview this Thursday, when he assured that he would present a counter-expert report to the judge. “That will be subject to contradiction,” he noted, referring to the 1.3 million euro estimate. “What I want to make clear is that we couldn’t even imagine that value”. And he added later: “I have never entered a jewelry store”.
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Immediately after the UDEF’s discovery, journalist Luis Arroyo, who acts as a kind of spokesman for the former president, pointed out that the jewels were the result of a family inheritance and travels, and that their value was between 30,000 and 50,000 euros, far from what was finally attributed by the experts. The pieces were found in a safe, where there were necklaces, rings, bracelets, and diamond and precious stone rings —some in white gold with sapphires and emeralds—.
“It has nothing to do with political activity,” Zapatero insisted during his interview on TVE, where he dodged all questions about the origin of the jewels. He did not want to say who gave them to him. Nor when. Nor under what circumstances. He justified himself by saying that he would give “the explanations” first to judge José Luis Calama. But, as he defended himself, “there has been absolutely no intention to defraud”. “There has been no use or patrimonial desire,” he said. “They were just there,” he commented, before admitting that their discovery has had a very negative impact on his public image.
For investigators, clarifying when he received the jewels is crucial to determine whether he can be accused of any crime, or if it can be considered prescribed. When the existence of the pieces and their millionaire value became known, Zapatero’s entourage indicated that the gift dates back to 2007.
