Juan Manuel Serrano, former chief of staff to Pedro Sánchez at the PSOE and former president of Correos, applied to the judge of the Audiencia Nacional, Santiago Pedraz, for the return of his mobile phone on 21 August 2026. He argues that, following the completion of a second forensic copy by the Unidad Central Operativa (UCO) of the Guardia Civil on Wednesday, 19 August 2026, the officers involved in the measure had said that the original device was no longer needed for further investigations.
Serrano’s defence had challenged the previous data copy because it was made without a lawyer present, and questioned whether the evidence could be used. Against this background, Judge Pedraz ordered the data to be copied again – this time in the presence of Serrano and his lawyer. The decision on whether to return the device is therefore at the court’s discretion, and had not been made by Friday.
Serrano appeared before the investigating judge on Tuesday, 18 August 2026, to verify the technical process used to make the copy. The following day, the UCO made another copy, the formal circumstances of which are now at the heart of the dispute. The request for the phone to be returned is proceeding alongside the application to annul the copy made without the defence present.
The case forms part of the investigation into the so-called caso Leire Díez. Court documents show that Serrano was questioned as a suspect on 10 July 2026. The government had described the UCO report then available on Serrano’s possible links to the case as being at a very early stage. Independently of this, the court is seeking to safeguard the integrity of any communications content and metadata by ensuring that the forensic steps are documented in a verifiable way.
The legal issue is the balance between the right to ownership of the original device that was seized and the investigative authorities’ need to preserve evidence. The key question will be whether the digital copies are considered complete, unaltered and admissible in court, and whether further technical checks – for example, to validate metadata or keys – still require access to the original. If the court accepts the defence’s objections, evidence from the disputed seizure could be excluded or replaced by a properly certified copy. If it rejects the challenges, analysis is likely to continue on the basis of the latest court-ordered data extraction.
Editor: Phillipe Schmidt-Araguin (Article created with AI assistance).