Editor’s Note
**Editor’s Note:** This article details the extensive array of seized materials—including jewelry, gold, hard drives, and personal diaries—that are bolstering the investigation into the Zapatero case. The evidence, ranging from 103 pieces of jewelry found in a former president’s safe to luxury watches confiscated from a key lender, underscores the deepening lines of inquiry.
Jewelry, gold, hard drives…: the overwhelming seized material strengthens the lines of investigation in the Zapatero case. In a safe in the former president’s office, there were 103 pieces of jewelry. The lender at the origin of the plot had 12 luxury watches seized from him.
A total of 17 diaries, 18 folders with documentation, two handwritten sheets, at least two USB drives, one hard drive, and three mobile phones. And, in addition, in a safe whose key was initially not held by Gertrudis Alcázar, Zapatero’s secretary—but which later appeared as police were preparing to force it open—up to 103 pieces of presumably luxury jewelry, including necklaces, earrings, bracelets, rings, bangles, and watches, among other items.
All of this was found by the Economic and Financial Crime Unit (Udef) in the apartment housing the office of former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero on Ferraz Street in Madrid, directly opposite the headquarters of the PSOE, the party he led and with which he governed Spain between 2004 and 2011.
The jewelry yesterday brought the case—in which Zapatero is charged with influence peddling, document forgery, and criminal organization, making him the first former president judicially investigated in Spanish democracy—into the realm of the folkloric. The case file does not clarify whether the items could be related to corrupt practices, nor even whether they are genuine jewelry or not—Alcázar claimed they were the “inheritance of Sonsoles Espinosa,” Zapatero’s wife, and “gifts from various trips”—but the search, which found “nothing noteworthy” in Zapatero’s own office (the apartment, paid for by the PSOE, consists of six rooms, and the safe was not in the former president’s personal office), did generate abundant material to investigate in the room shared by secretaries Alcázar and Judith Wells.
There, agents found folders for companies and projects (ChinaLink Asia, EY, Kreab, Tecnocasa), others for invoices, contracts, and conferences, and some more for publishers and consultancies. They also seized several diaries labeled “President Zapatero” from between 2019 and 2025, among a total of around fifteen diaries. They also downloaded the email accounts and One Drive (cloud storage) of both Gertrudis and Judith. As the investigation progresses, the role of the former—secretary and support person for Zapatero since his early days as Secretary General of the PSOE around the year 2000—is certainly key, and probably already incriminating for her boss.
It is therefore foreseeable that in everything obtained by the Police on Tuesday, May 19, the morning the searches were carried out and Zapatero’s indictment was announced, there may be more evidence of the allegedly illicit practices in which both the former president and his “front man,” according to the Udef, Julio Martínez, and the public decision-makers who may have played a role in the bailout of Plus Ultra, engaged.
Furthermore, this Monday it emerged that Zapatero was not the only one hoarding jewelry potentially linked to the Plus Ultra bailout plot in his office. On October 24, in the Udef’s first police action, agents also searched the home in Palma de Mallorca of Dutch lender Simon Verhoeven and found twelve luxury wristwatches, a gold choker, rings, necklaces, and two gold bars.
Verhoeven is at the origin of the case in which Zapatero is now assigned the role of leader of a criminal organization. Switzerland and France detected in 2024 that money from the Plus Ultra bailout ended up in accounts belonging to Verhoeven, a gold trafficker, and requested assistance from Spain. They were laundering money stolen by Chavismo from Venezuela. That first search led to Zapatero’s a week ago. Zapatero is due to testify before Judge Calama in a week, on Tuesday, June 2.