How a Venezuelan bailout became a threat to Spain's political establishment

On June 17, former Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (in office 2004 to 2011) will make history as the first person of his standing to appear before the National Court, cited by Judge José Luis Calama.

Calama is examining whether Zapatero led a network that profited from lobbying for Plus Ultra, according to a report by ABC News.

Calama has identified some €1.95 million moved via front companies, falsified paperwork, and opaque financial routes, according to NBC News, as quoted by Quartz media on May 20.

The judge’s indictment adds that a corruption scandal at this scale, with the ex-prime minister at the center, could only have occurred with a high degree of political impunity in Spain.

Information about court documents, with new twists and turns, is published across the Spanish media daily and discussed ad nauseam in the bars and cafés.

The funds provided for the bailout of the Plus Ultra airline were allegedly used to channel millions of euros to foreign corporate networks involved in Venezuelan gold and oil trades. Following the indictment, the judge froze approximately €490,000 in Zapatero-linked accounts, as well as the accounts of his daughters’ marketing company, What the Fav.

UDEF, a Spanish National Police unit for the investigation of money laundering and large-scale corruption, has conducted raids, including four simultaneous ones last month, targeting Zapatero’s and others’ offices or business premises, following an initial raid on the Plus Ultra airline headquarters at Adolfo Suárez Madrid-Barajas Airport.

Calama alleges that Zapatero and people in his circle received €1.95m. ($2.11m.) in improper payments from the Plus Ultra bailout case.

The judge has issued international arrest warrants for Plus Ultra primary shareholders Venezuelan Rodolfo Reyes and María Aurora López, for alleged membership in a criminal organization, embezzlement, and money laundering, Democrata media reported on May 25.

In a May 19 report, El País explained: “The Attorney-General’s Office, led by Alejandro Luzón, has been looking since 2024 into the whereabouts of the bailout funds [for Plus Ultra] granted in March 2021, after receiving two information requests from authorities in Switzerland and France regarding alleged money laundering activities in those countries.”

In a May 28, 12-hour search and data clone raid on the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party’s (PSOE) iconic Madrid headquarters on Ferraz Street, the Civil Guard’s elite crime investigation unit and anti-corruption division (UCO), operating under judicial orders, turned up an alleged network used to discredit judicial cases.

According to media reports, UCO uncovered extensive incriminating material, including high-end luxury jewels currently valued in the press at €1m., in Zapatero’s domains. The former prime minister claims the jewels are a family inheritance of his wife.

Zapatero, in his role as diplomatic mediator in Venezuela, got Sánchez to agree to bail out the minuscule Venezuelan Plus Ultra airline during the COVID-19 pandemic, for €53m., a sum far beyond the worth of the airline. Judge Calama says a Dubai-based shell company was created to assist with covering the airline bailout’s money trail.

An immediate result of that bailout was a visit to Spain by then-Venezuelan-president Nicolás Maduro’s number two, vice president Delcy Rodriguez, who arrived on the tarmac at Barajas with many heavy suitcases and facing no controls. What those suitcases were filled with remains to be seen.

Part of the money Zapatero earned from his dealings with the Venezuelan regime may have been laundered through his two daughters’ marketing agency, coming from a consulting firm called Analisis Relevante. Currently, they have not been indicted. Speculation in the media is that if they are, Zapatero is likely to make a deal to spare them. That would bring the hot seat closer to Sánchez.

IN TERMS of the ongoing corruption cases of those who have been closest to Sánchez, “Abalos,” “Koldo,” and “Aldama” have become household names across Spain in the past few years.

José Luis Abalos, once Sánchez’s influential transport and development minister and former member of the Congress of Deputies, is in jail, awaiting sentencing this week, after three years.

It is expected that Abalos, from whom Sánchez has distanced himself, will receive a longish sentence, as will his aide, Koldo García, for their involvement in the famous “Caso Koldo,” an alleged scheme for the provision of cheaper and subpar COVID masks to the health services, playing with people’s lives during the pandemic.

Víctor de Aldama is accused of facilitating the mask business. He has cooperated with information-sharing with the judiciary since the case began. Aria media noted that “in the last two [court] sessions, it has become clear that Aldama had the ability to move around the Ministry of Transport headquarters, in the Nuevos Ministerios complex, as if he were one of them.”

The case has become a major political liability for Sánchez. The fate of Aldama appears to be where Zapatero’s (and therefore also the prime minister’s) future hangs most in the balance.

Analisis Relevante, the corporate network that made payments to Zapatero’s daughters, is managed by Martinez. It is now alleged to have been created for the sole purpose of money-laundering kickbacks from Plus Ultra. In 2020, as Plus Ultra lobbied Zapatero for a Spanish government bailout, his daughters received an initial transfer of €25,400 from Analisis Relevante.

On May 19, in a raid on the offices of Zapatero, UDEF discovered a hidden safe containing over 100 luxury items, watches, and pieces of jewelry, as well as Martinez’s handwritten notes detailing transactions with Venezuela.

Previously, when UDEF officers, on December 11 last year, raided Martinez’s home, they discovered €286,000 in cash hidden in cardboard boxes, radiators, and golf bags.

A MASSIVE cover-up operation is alleged to have been set in motion on the day that Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, was formally charged with corruption, influence peddling, and embezzlement after a two-year investigation in a ruling dated April 11, published two days later.

At that point, the prime minister announced to the country that he was taking a pause for four days of reflection to decide whether or not to resign. He is alleged to have immediately called a meeting with his right-hand man, Santos Cerdan, then-PSOE organizational secretary (who resigned last year after a judge found “firm evidence” of his taking kickbacks on public construction contracts), and is alleged to have given the order to interfere with any processes against him. Cerdan was a busy man, so a woman called Leire Diez was the “operational person of Santos Cerdan,” the political analyst explained.

When agents from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard raided the home of Diez in December, in a sealed National Court investigation into an alleged judicial obstruction plot, they found copious evidence against her for allegedly orchestrating an operation to obstruct justice and derail corruption cases involving the PSOE or the government. They seized electronic devices, notebooks, and diaries. She was arrested and later released on bail

During the Ferraz headquarters raid last month, the UCO acquired information linking Diez’s activities and travel expenses directly to the party leadership.

Information was also found on the activities of SEPI (the State Industrial Holdings Company), Correos (state postal service), Tragsa (a state-owned company), and EFE, the state news agency.

Diez’s notes and recordings span several years of plans, calls, meetings, ideas, negotiations, and notes on suspected corruption within public entities she worked for, or those she learned about from former SEPI president Vicente Fernández, with whom she maintained a romantic relationship. He also charged in this case.

Information stored by Diez indicates a direct attempt to tamper with evidence by then-transport minister Abalos, at the time, Sánchez’s number two in both the government and the socialist party.

According to media reports, the UCO has collected proof of attempts at varying bureaucratic levels and even inside the Civil Guard to shut down the UCO’s investigation.

On Wednesday, Democrata media published that the State Attorney-General’s Office had ratified before National High Court Judge Santiago Pedraz, who is investigating the Diez case, the existence of two meetings between Diez, Cerdan’s lawyer, and a former high-ranking official linked to then-attorney-general Álvaro García Ortiz, who resigned as attorney-general in 2025, found guilty by the Supreme Court of revealing secrets in a mudslinging attack on Madrid President Isabel Díaz Ayuso, a sharp critic of Sánchez.

Diez is yet another person whom Sánchez denies knowing, in his classic: “I don’t know”; “I haven’t heard”; “I am not aware” meme-spawning response.

AT A time when he could be nearing the end of his career, Sánchez chose to redirect public attention by praising the son of the arch-terrorist Marwan Barghouti, Arab Barghouti, who spoke at the Primavera Sound music festival in Barcelona on June 6, addressing the massive crowd even before the first act, at what has become a major hub for pro-Palestinian activism. Barghouti thanked the residents of Barcelona for supporting the Palestinian cause.

Sánchez greeted him after his speech, praising his “resistance.” The Spanish prime minister later posted a video of Barghouti’s speech on his official Instagram account, with “Thank you for raising your voice.”

That morning, Sánchez had met with Pope Leo XIV to welcome him to Spain, upon the premier’s own recent return from visiting the pope in Rome. The prime minister was criticized by the media and the public for not attending more events with the pope and instead using the government Falcon plane to attend Primavera Sound with his wife.

The pope’s visit, an enormously popular event in Spain, bringing people from all over the country to Madrid, was strategically planned by Sánchez in one of his masterful smokescreens to direct public attention away from the trials, the analyst noted.

The analyst described the head and poster boy of the Socialist International as “good-looking, plays the part of just the right sort of Western leader to position against Trump and Israel, but he is an empty suit.”

According to testimony given to the investigating judge by businessman Aldama, an oil transaction involving six million barrels of Venezuelan crude, valued at approximately €250m., was allegedly orchestrated by Zapatero to funnel kickbacks to the PSOE and the International Socialist. This appears to be how “godfather” Zapatero bought Sánchez his seat as head of the International Socialist.

If the forthcoming testimony manages to tie Sánchez in with any of these threads, Spain’s current prime minister will likely be facing jail time.