Failed attempt to overthrow the Brodie case. The head of the Court of First Instance and Instruction 4 of Majadahonda (Madrid), Delia Rodrigo, has issued an order in which she flatly rejects the attempt by lawyer Tomás González Cueto, external legal advisor of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). and Luis Rubiales’s most trusted man when he was president, to annul some key pieces of the summary. Among them, the telephone interventions of the main parties involved, including him, as well as various procedures derived from them, such as the entry and search of homes, where numerous electronic devices were intervened; some reports from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard and even the March arrests themselves. The magistrate considers, however, that those wiretaps fully complied with the law, in addition to considering them a “necessary” interference with the secrecy of communications to corroborate the evidence collected until then and be able to “continue with the investigation” into the plot that supposedly looted the RFEF during the Rubiales presidency (2018-2023) through the alleged rigging of contracts, as stated in the order to which EL PAÍS has had access.
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In his now rejected appeal, González Cueto considered that the order issued by the judge on January 24 to authorize the wiretaps, when the case was still secret, was not sufficiently motivated by the judge and, therefore, these were null and void. For this reason, he also claimed that all the information obtained thanks to them by the Civil Guard could not be used in the summary and the proceedings derived from it were also annulled. The judge rejects, in an order issued on Tuesday and known this Thursday, the argument put forward by Rubiales’s right-hand man when considering that, although the order that authorized them basically referred to the UCO letter in which it requested the measure and to the report from the Prosecutor’s Office supporting the measure for the order, it included “objective evidence that quite justified the agreed measure.” In her judicial resolution, the judge insists that the measure was taken “after several months of investigation and after studying the intervened documentation.” For all these reasons, she concludes that “there is no cause for nullity in the appealed order, so the appeal for reform must be dismissed. A corollary of the above is that it is not appropriate to decree the annulment of the intervention measures that derive from the aforementioned order, nor is it appropriate to expel the procedure of the police offices, nor can the annulment of the appellant’s detention be decreed, “she adds. The decision can still be appealed.
The wiretapping incorporated into the Operation Brodie summary provided numerous information about the alleged rigging of RFEF contracts, including that of the remodeling of the La Cartuja stadium in Seville, carried out in 2021, or the one that has carried out the Super Cup matches. from Spain to Saudi Arabia. In addition, they also brought to light the misgivings, disagreements and reproaches that arose among those allegedly involved once Rubiales resigned as president of the federation on September 10 after being prosecuted for the non-consensual kiss of soccer player Jennifer Hermoso. In fact, the day after the order authorizing the wiretaps, the investigators intervened in a conversation with González Cueto himself in which he was honest with his interlocutor and charged against the then former president of the organization: “When this guy goes around, the only thing What he wants is to hit. He hasn’t planned to work, but rather to hit… but not 15 or 20,000 euros, but 200,000 or more, you know?, because he says that he needs 100,000 euros a month. It’s just that he says some things. Seriously, he is like a fucking goat,” he said.
On February 21, González Cueto informed Alejandro Blanco, president of the Spanish Olympic Committee, in another telephone conversation about an incident he had had with the former president of the federation: “He told me to do something that was illegal and I couldn’t do it to him and I told him […]. It’s scary, what we’ve all risked at the time.” On another occasion, the lawyer, to whom investigators attribute in their reports great power in the organization due to his closeness to Rubiales, once again criticized his obsession with money when talking about a project in Saudi Arabia: “And the first thing What he says is that he wants a kilo [millón de euros] for him […]. He is going to give the blow and people can’t stand him anymore, they can’t tolerate him anymore.” The former president of the RFEF himself also criticized the man who had been his trusted man in the intercepted conversations. “Thomas [González Cueto]When he joined the Federation with me he had a firm with six lawyers and now he has a firm with twenty-something lawyers. He had an office that invoiced 500,000 euros and now he has an office that invoices three million euros,” he assured an interlocutor.
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2024-05-16 18:47:21
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