Just over ten days have passed since former minister José Luis Ábalos threatened to withdraw his support for the government in Congress. “From now on, I will vote with a clear conscience, I will no longer be a supporter of the PSOE,” he said in an interview with El Español. A declaration of intentions that further tightens the negotiations between Moncloa and its parliamentary partners and which had its first concrete result this Wednesday: two abstentions in two PP initiatives.
The former Minister of Transport, now relegated to the Joint Group, distanced himself from the PSOE for the first time during the legislature and did so twice. First in a text that urged the government to recognize Edmundo González as the elected president of Venezuela, and then in a motion supporting an autonomous financing model negotiated in a “multilateral” manner, a PP move in response to the agreement between the PSC and the ERC. a concert in Catalonia.
The first initiative was supposed to be successful thanks to the votes of the PNV, which announced its support on Tuesday morning. And it is likely that the PP will also manage to pass the second motion once Junts announces that it will be absent from the plenary session to attend the Diada celebrations in Catalonia. But no one anticipated that a yellow dot, indicating an abstention, would appear in the results of the vote in the seat of the “chicken coop” that Ábalos has occupied since February.
Neither vote has any practical effect. Both initiatives are movements promoted by the PP against the government and of a purely symbolic nature. Nor would Ábalos’ abstention have changed the outcome of either of these two referendums: the progressive coalition continues to depend on Junts to advance its proposals in Congress.
The former minister’s gesture did not go unnoticed in the socialist ranks, but the parliamentary group believes that it is a movement without practical effects that will hardly be repeated in important votes for the Government. When he joined the Mixed Group, without leaving his seat as requested by the PSOE following the news of the “Koldo case” that was making headlines at the time, he assured that it would not pose a problem for the parliamentary majority of the Government.
An idea that began to change in his head recently. More precisely, on a Friday at the end of August. His successor, Óscar Puente, appeared in the Senate at the request of the PP regarding the situation of the railways and in his speech, the minister announced the publication of the results of an internal audit following allegations of corruption in the department due to the contracts for masks during the pandemic. The report, published a few hours later, indicated the responsibility of Ábalos and his team in the purchase of medical supplies.
The investigation even mentions the former minister, who signed, according to the documents provided, an order that doubled the purchase of masks in less than an hour. Following the results of this audit, Puente dismissed two senior officials from the former minister’s time who were still part of the cabinet, Jesús Manuel Gómez and Michaux Miranda.
The most immediate effect of this investigation was the statements in which the former “number three” of the PSOE sent a message to his party. “More than a report or an audit, this looks like a court of honor, which is prohibited by the Constitution,” he later said in an interview with Cuatro.
At the time, neither the PSOE nor Moncloa chose to consider these statements as a real threat. The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, Ángel Víctor Torres, assured that he was convinced that the former minister would continue to “support and defend progressive proposals” in Congress. A perception that has not changed much despite the two votes this Wednesday.
Ábalos believes that there is a strategy against him and assumes that he will end up accused in the “Koldo case”, the case that investigates an alleged corruption plot to collect million-dollar commissions through the purchase of medical supplies during the pandemic. The case led by Judge Ismael Moreno points to the former minister’s advisor, Koldo García, as the leader of a network that extends between the ministry’s positions. The investigation seeks to determine whether Koldo and several businessmen such as Víctor Aldama managed to obtain million-dollar public contracts for the purchase of masks and medical supplies during the first year of the pandemic, intended to be awarded to people linked to the plot.
“Those who are trying to reach an agreement with the prosecution accept their guilt and I have done nothing. They want to charge me, they will try, but we will see what the Supreme Court says. It is clear that all these searches are for me. They even know the name of my partner, where I go, what I do. And no one says the word ‘allegedly’ here. It is a lynching,” Ábalos denounced in an interview with Onda Cero this week.
On the same day, however, the judge rejected a request from the far-right association Iustitia Europa to indict him for the conclusions of the investigation promoted by Puente. For the moment, the magistrate is awaiting the conclusions of a recent UCO report resulting from the searches carried out at Koldo García’s personal home.
Ábalos also responded in this interview to a series of leaked and recently published emails about his trips as minister and the presence of a woman who accompanied him and who worked in a public company dependent on his ministry. The former socialist leader assured that this person was his partner at that time and that all the expenses related to these trips were assumed by himself. “They were always my responsibility, it was never paid with public money,” he said.
Regarding this email, in which the details of expenses related to meals and travel can be seen, and which the woman allegedly claimed from him, Ábalos maintained that it was a “fake email”. “I have the emails and I created them, it was a trap to catch a person and due to life circumstances it is now being used in this way, but it is from 2019 and has nothing to do with the pandemic. This person is not asking me for anything and I have not paid anything, but they have managed to make it viral and they are campaigns with a lot of contempt,” he said in the interview.
In his strategy of presenting himself as a victim of persecution, Ábalos decided to request to appear in the case as an injured party, which the judge rejected this Wednesday. In the letter he sent to the court, the former minister argued that although the investigator had not asked him for a “request for information” and he had not been summoned “under any conditions”, “the information and news that concerned him” personally, I continued to appear and direct. The prosecution also filed, at the request of the former minister, a complaint for the alleged leaks of the case.
However, the judge understands that to be harmed in the criminal proceedings, “it is necessary to demand additional costs greater than those of the simple fact of being affected by the facts that are the subject of the investigation or by a certain diligence that has been carried out.” And he adds that the audit “cannot be considered a circumstance that accompanies or arises from the commission of the crimes that are the subject of the investigation.”
