This Friday in the Senate, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, broke with his predecessor in power, José Luis Ábalos, by dismissing two senior officials he kept in his cabinet and who have emerged seriously damaged by the internal investigation into the “Koldo” case opened just a few months ago. The audit, published on the ministry’s website, speaks of “irregularities” in the contracts for the purchase of masks during the pandemic and points the finger at the management of the former minister’s team.
Puente appeared this Friday in the Upper House at the request of the PP and announced the dismissal of the Undersecretary of Transport, Jesús Manuel Gómez, and the Director General of People Management of the Railway Director, Michaux Miranda, already indicted by the judge of the National Court, Ismael Moreno, in the case investigating the alleged irregularities in the purchase of masks by the Ministry during the pandemic, known as the “Koldo case”, named after Ábalos’ Transport advisor, the alleged leader of the plot.
In March, the current minister already dismissed the Secretary General of the State of Ports, Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares, who was in charge of handling the largest contract that the judge is investigating, for an amount of 20 million euros to Soluciones de Gestión y Apoyo a la Empresa, the main company.
“Given the procedural situation, I do not make an assessment of this decision, the facts extracted from the audit cause a loss of confidence,” justified Puente during his appearance, in which he read the main conclusions of the internal audit on the purchase of FFP2 masks ordered at the height of the pandemic by two entities of his department, State Ports, from the Koldo García plot. An audit that, according to Puente, ended last Tuesday, August 20, and which concludes that “it seems evident that the requirements” for purchases through emergency contracts “were not met.”
Transport duplicated a purchase order in 38 minutes
The Ministry of Transport doubled the first purchase of masks in just 38 minutes. During this period, the Ábalos department sent an order that changed an initial order of almost 4 million masks to about 8. According to documents provided during the audit, the portfolio ended up paying 20 million euros for this purchase, as of March 20, just a week after the government declared a state of alarm due to the pandemic situation.
“On March 20, 2020, at 7:55 p.m., an order signed by the Minister was sent to the Undersecretary from the mailbox of the Minister’s Office. […] which regulates the acquisition and distribution of up to 4 million masks by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda. However, on the same day, March 20, at 8:33 p.m., a new order signed by the Minister was sent from the same mailbox, canceling the previous one and regulating the acquisition and distribution of up to 8 million masks by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda […]”, the report describes.
During the investigation, the auditors questioned Gómez about this sudden change and the undersecretary claimed that everything was due to the demands of the vendor, the company Soluciones de Gestión SL. “The supplier provided 8 million or nothing,” said the senior official of the ministry that Koldo García had told him at the time. Gómez also assured the investigators that the purchase order was signed by Ábalos himself, so he understood that the change had his approval.
“Attention can only be drawn to the fact that this modification of the object of the emergency does not meet the criteria required in a procedure of these characteristics, already mentioned in this report, given that the justification of the scope is considered insufficiently resolved (number of masks to be acquired) of the emergency”, supports the internal investigation.
Even if it was an “all or nothing” offer, the report continues, “the hypothetical lack of room for action between zero and eight million masks” should have been “sufficiently justified in the file, as motivation for the change in “scope of the emergency.”
The report does not question the price paid for the masks – even lower than the market price according to a subsequent analysis – and does not find it surprising that there is only one supplier in such a situation, but considers that the Ministry should have justified and documented in the file the search for other possible candidates or the argument for not carrying out this search. “Considering all of the above, and recalling that an emergency procedure allows an order to be placed even in a purely verbal manner, it is considered that the contracting body should have dealt with this justification, in the interests of maximum transparency and objectivity of the process,” the document states.
The audit also mentions the second purchase of masks by the Ministry of Transport, an order placed on March 25, when the packages of the first shipment had not even landed. In this document, there were more bidding companies, some with lower price proposals, he assured. Therefore, the audit does not consider that the award to Management Solutions is justified.
This second purchase, like the first, was initially entrusted to Puertos del Estado as the project manager, although Adif was finally ordered: 5 million more despite the fact that the first batches of the 8 million contracted on December 20 had not yet arrived.
“In all the documentation analyzed, there is no study or analysis of needs that would justify the acquisition of 5 million additional masks, just 6 days after the approval of the first order, in which it was also decided to purchase double the number of masks as had initially been considered necessary based on the studies carried out in the Ministry,” says the report, which asks the Undersecretary for the justification for this new order. Gómez does not remember who decided the amount and claims that when it was approved, “it was not known what the needs were” and that they were purchased “in anticipation.”
For the future, the audit report considers it essential to identify the people who participate in the purchasing procedures. Puente stressed that, among the preventive measures proposed in the report, is that people who have no connection with the administration do not intervene in this type of purchasing procedures. “Reference is made to Mr. Aldama, directly or indirectly,” he stressed, referring to the businessman and president of Zamora CF who served as mediator.
Judge investigates $52 million contracts
The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office began investigating secretly more than two years ago, at the end of April 2022. Almost a year ago, the investigations entered another dimension, that of surveillance and wiretapping, when the case was continued before the National Court. Since then, Judge Ismael Moreno has been investigating whether Koldo García, a former advisor to José Luis Ábalos when he was Minister of Transport, and several businessmen such as Víctor Aldama managed to obtain public contracts worth one million dollars for the purchase of masks and medical supplies during the first half of the year of the pandemic from people illegally linked to the plot. The shift of the investigation to the media led the PSOE to suspend Ábalos from activism last February, who had decided to keep his seat in Congress to be able to defend himself, he said at the time.
According to Anti-Corruption, Koldo García was the one who provided friendly businessmen with information about the medical supply awards that were going to be made and who maintained a “direct relationship” with the officials who awarded some of the contracts. In addition, according to the judge, he maintained his “ability to influence personnel linked to the ministry and, in particular, the entities that awarded the contracts instructed” even two years after leaving the government in the summer of 2021.
Eight contracts awarded for almost 52 million euros by different entities of the public administration are suspected. Among them, Puertos del Estado and Adif, which depend on transport, but also on regional governments such as the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands. Last March, Minister Puente dismissed the former Secretary General of the State Ports, Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares, who was in charge of handling the largest contract related to the land.
In recent months, National Court Judge Ismael Moreno and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office have clashed over who should centralize the investigation into the case. Last July, the Supreme Court resolved this conflict of jurisdiction and ruled that the case should continue to be heard by the Special Court. The judges of the Criminal Chamber stated that they were investigating “the possible existence of a criminal organization aimed at irregularly obtaining contracts for medical supplies,” with the intervention of businessmen and “public officials” to ultimately “hide the profits.” Inform Elena Herrera.
