He was not just any minister or just any socialist. José Luis Ábalos was all in the PSOE. And that was it for Pedro Sánchez. An essential piece for the current President of the Government to regain leadership of the party, after this fateful October 1, 2016 when an organic operation orchestrated by the leadership forced him to resign from his position as secretary general. He then entrusted him with the party’s organizational secretariat and later also appointed him Minister of Public Works.
It was Ábalos who was responsible for defending from the podium of the Congress of Deputies the motion of censure with which Sánchez came to the government, after a judgment of the National Court which condemned the PP for having benefited from Gürtel’s plot and accrediting a box B. And he said in this speech: “We Spaniards cannot tolerate corruption and indecency as if it were something normal, we cannot normalize corruption” because “today, we are debating the decency of our democracy.”
The government of Pedro Sánchez arrived with the fight against corruption as its banner. For this reason and because the case comes at one of the worst times for the Executive – with the blocking of inaugurations broken, with the Provincial Court of Madrid giving carte blanche to Judge Peinado to investigate Begoña Gómez and with the unapproved budgets – it is therefore, at Moncloa this Thursday, the UCO report which designates the former minister at the epicenter of the Koldo affair fell like a bucket of cold water.
The estimates of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and the calculations of the persons investigated themselves have given figures to date which bring the public rewards for the conspiracy to 60 million euros, the commissions to 16.5 million euros and l money to insure. secure communications with its members. The latest report provided by the Civil Guard to National Court judge Ismael Moreno reveals that the alleged author of the plot, businessman Víctor de Aldama, “seemed to estimate that he was going to obtain income worth 60 000,000 euros thanks to Commercial Management Solutions.
And at the PSOE they do not explain, or they do but they do not want to conjecture, how Ábalos fell into the hands of this businessman, today in prison for another case of corruption linked to VAT on hydrocarbons. The fact is, yes, Pedro Sánchez has a problem. Another. It is doubly painful, according to the socialists, because it affects a person who belonged to their innermost circle within the party and the government and because his arrival at Moncloa was a direct consequence of the corruption of the PP.
The slogans are in any case clear: “There will be no impunity”, “he who pays” and “with us the institutions work because the prosecution has fully invested in this investigation”. Sánchez himself declared this on Friday from Rome: “Absolute force in any allusion to a case of corruption that unfortunately could have occurred in my government and absolute collaboration with justice and state security forces.” And he added that his government is “clean, which has nothing to do with this lack of exemplarity and bordering on corruption”.
This sudden dismissal from the post of minister
If there is anyone in the entire socialist universe who was not surprised by the events reported by the Civil Guard sent to Judge Ismael Moreno, it is perhaps Pedro Sánchez. Perhaps because already during his first government overhaul, in July 2021 and faced with the lack of understanding of part of the cabinet and the PSOE, he surprised Ábalos as Minister of Public Works. He was then accused of being cold and implacable and of having a utilitarian sense of personal relationships for having abandoned, without explanation, one of his most loyal men.
Sánchez did not give explanations to anyone and, when a socialist later asked him to count on Ábalos again for the government or the party, the answer was a categorical no, although he never wanted to explore the reasons further. The obligatory question today is therefore to know what the President of the Government knew then to dismiss overnight someone with whom he had even shared the details of the overhaul of the government of which a few hours later he would no longer be part . We will never know, but at the PSOE they leave it at that: “a president receives a multitude of information, some good and others less, and with all of it he makes his decisions.”
The fact is that this time no government minister questions what was revealed by the investigators, as some did with Sánchez’s decision to remove Ábalos from the government and also with the decision to demand that he be a member of Congress. the same day when Koldo, a close collaborator of the former minister, was arrested.
“It’s an ugly affair and it seems very serious because all the facts reported by the UCO are accredited and there is not a single value judgment in the report,” says a member of the cabinet, for whom even the The researchers’ formulation seems “reasonable” and “not at all biased” like other police reports. “It is a measured and even cautious document, without exaggerations or conjectures,” adds the same interlocutor.
Judge Ismael Moreno and the prosecution were already investigating an alleged plot introduced to the ministry to obtain contracts for the purchase and sale of masks at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, in exchange for the payment of irregular commissions, but this week a Civil Guard report, of more than 200 pages, emphasizes that the businessman Aldama made “payments” to Koldo “in cash”, with the aim of being able to maintain this direct “access” to the one who was then advisor to the minister and to Ábalos himself. “These cash payments were accompanied by other considerations also to the former minister Ábalos”, according to the investigators, who mention the payment of months of rent for an apartment of his then partner in the center of Madrid and the purchase from a chalet in Cadiz which the former minister appreciated.
Feijóo: “He knew it, he covered it up and lied”
Within the government and in the leadership of the PSOE, it is assumed that it is now time to “grit our teeth” in the face of the opposition offensive, which already promises to push for elevation, as demonstrated Ayuso calling for Sánchez’s resignation and Feijóo himself arguing that the president cannot stay another day in Moncloa because “he knew it, he hid it and he lied.” However, the socialists speak of a circumscribed case and are trying to build a retaining wall in front of Ábalos, because they are convinced that the scandal only affects the former minister and does not affect any other portfolio holder. “There is tranquility in this regard,” says another minister for whom we must now appreciate the immediate reaction of Sánchez himself, when he dismissed him from the government and, later, demanded the certificate of his deputy. A decision that Ferraz contrasts with the inaction of the PP in its corruption cases.
The statement made on Friday by the Minister of Justice of Luxembourg in which he said he was “very proud to belong to a government which has been, is and will always be implacable against corruption” is the same as that heard within the leadership socialist. who knows exactly what he will face in the coming days regarding the PP, which will try to spread a stain of corruption throughout the government and the PSOE.
For now, he will use his absolute majority in the Upper House to extend as much as possible the commission of inquiry created in March for the so-called Koldo case and we cannot rule out bringing Pedro Sánchez himself to testify. And until then, Feijóo is trying to draw attention to the PNV, which was the one that made possible the motion of censure against Mariano Rajoy for a corruption case, and which today could do the same if the PP proposed using the same instrument. against Sánchez, which he had not ruled out a few months ago.
