Leire Díez, the alleged fixer of the PSOE, held three meetings with the Director General of the Civil Guard, in addition to conversations via mobile phone, with the purpose of passing on information. Furthermore, she urged the director, Mercedes González, to initiate an “internal investigation” within the armed institute against the UCO. This is recorded in one of the Civil Guard reports incorporated into the Leire case file accessed by EL PAÍS. When asked by a journalist, the Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, denied on May 28 that the two had met: “The Director of the Civil Guard has not had any meeting with any person, the one you mentioned, Leire or anyone else, in any terms.”
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Government sources assure that González never met with Leire Díez in her capacity as Director General of the Civil Guard, and that no investigation was opened within the armed institute based on indications or information coming from Díez.
Judge Santiago Pedraz, who is investigating the case against Díez in the National Court, pointed out in his order last week that the alleged plot sought to “disturb the normal development of the UCO’s actions,” and that to this end they tried to present complaints against the Unit to the State Attorney General’s Office, as well as to collect “personal and reserved (legally secret) data and information of the commanders involved in the investigations” against former senior government and PSOE officials.
But it also pointed to another operation: “To raise suspicion” about the UCO’s actions “before the Director General of the Civil Guard.” That suspicion may have motivated “the opening of separate confidential information files.” According to the order, the UCO was accused of possibly leaking compromising messages between former Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos and other relevant party members, which appeared in the press, even though members of Leire Díez’s alleged plot knew they had not come from the UCO.
It is this last point, the conversations with Mercedes González and the decision to open an internal investigation into the UCO, to which the facts in the Civil Guard report refer.
The investigations set the start of communications between Díez and González “at least” on May 9, 2025. Two days later, “a relevant event occurs in the WhatsApp conversation between the two,” states the Civil Guard report. That day, at 9:16 in the morning, the shared chat records a message “compatible with a previous conversation having been deleted and a new one started” and secondly “that the Director General of the Civil Guard activated automatic message deletion between the two.”
The Civil Guard deduces from the recounted facts that there was communication between Leire Díez and Mercedes González prior to the latter’s appointment as Director General of the armed institute, but also that after her appointment, on September 17, 2024, the existence of “at least three meetings” held on September 30 and December 20, 2024, and April 2, 2025, is confirmed. González had already held the same position between March and June 2023.
Additionally, the UCO states that it has gathered “indications from which it is inferred that Leire [Díez] was passing on information obtained within the framework of the allegedly criminal activity she was carrying out.” And it concludes that everything “culminates with the set of elements from which it is inferred that Leire intended the start of an ‘internal investigation’ within the Civil Guard directed against its Central Operative Unit, presumably using the director herself [of the armed institute].”
The report specifies that between May 9 and 14, 2025, a “confidential information” (internal investigation) was opened within the Civil Guard “directed at the investigators of the Central Operative Unit.” The likely purpose of this, the report states, was “to clarify the leaks that may have taken place.”
The Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, categorically denied on May 28 that Díez and González had met. When explicitly asked by a journalist, the minister responded that “the Director of the Civil Guard has not had any meeting with any person, the one you mentioned, Leire or anyone else, in any terms.” He also denied it on June 25, 2025, in a session in Congress, where Marlaska stated that “the Civil Guard denied any conversation or any visit by Leire [Díez] to the director” of the armed institute.
When consulted on the matter, the ministry has not yet provided explanations about the information appearing in the file, reports Juana Viúdez.
The investigations also include conversations of Leire Díez with other people in the plot that would corroborate the content of the meetings between the alleged fixer and the senior Civil Guard official. Thus, the Civil Guard report records that Leire Díez spoke via WhatsApp with Leticia de la Hoz, current lawyer of Koldo García. In that conversation, dated May 9, 2025, Díez literally said: “I just bet a meal with Mercedes [González] that the leaks come from the UCO.”
The UCO traces the start of Leire Díez’s actions regarding the Civil Guard back to early 2025. This is recorded in a comment from Díez to another of the accused, Vicente Fernández Guerrero, on February 25, where she directly mentions Mercedes González: “I have to check it, but I think the UCO unit involved is the same one we are investigating. And remember I am friends with the DG [Director General] of the CG [Civil Guard].”
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