Former Minister of Transport José Luis Ábalos has said enough. After the audit ordered and released by the current head of the portfolio, Óscar Puente, Ábalos, in a telephone conversation with ABC, assures that “they are coming to get me” and that this will have “consequences that I am studying, on the one hand legal and on the other hand political, because it is obvious that they tried to incriminate me“.
To begin with, his attitude as a member of the Joint Group will change: “Until now, I did not need to think about it, I did not even read the agenda, I followed the directive of the parliamentary group, but given its attitude (that of the party) I will do the same too. “I was acting with supporters, because the discipline did not correspond to being outside the socialist parliamentary group, but given the very unpresentable attitude they have had…” Regarding what he will do if he has to vote for the agreement with ERC for his own Catalan domain, he maintains that “we will have to see how they propose it, we will see from now on, because after this gesture nothing commits me.”
The investigation The internal investigation ordered by Puente has eclipsed all previous confrontations with his party, which even saw him suspended from activism.
The former minister insists that the published report is not an audit, but rather a “compliance”, like those carried out by companies and other organisations to identify risks: “It is a bad precedent, because investigations of this type cannot be carried out when there is a criminal case.” open, but it is also poorly conducted and with bad intentions. Jose Luis Abalos He says that compliance “cannot be entrusted to a unit that is dependent on you, because it has no independence” and adds that “no one interviewed was warned that this was going to be public… It is astonishing in every sense of the word.”
“We were going to have fun…”
What is more, the former head of the Transport portfolio He asks himself several questions: “Hey, ask everyone. Why isn’t this being done in the other ministries involved in the same judicial investigation? Health has two contracts in judicial investigation and the Interior, of course, in this same case. Why haven’t they finished? And in the rest of the administrations, we were going to have a lot of fun… Óscar Puente himself bought masks and they denounced him, because he had bought them from a friend of his, and the judge said that being a friend It was good for him to get them, they would sell them…”
Ábalos remembers the publications from a few years ago with photographs of Puente spending the summer on a yacht in the waters of the Balearic Islands paid for by the businessman from whom he had bought anti-Covid material months before for the Valladolid City Hall. “They said that the yacht case was not a crime because the trip was paid for by the owner of the company but not by the company they had contracted with… He lived it too.” Indeed, judge Elena López Negrete dismissed the case because businessman Sergio Zaiteguio paid the 6,500 euros for the yacht rental “out of his own pocket” and not through the company that had obtained a contract for 195,178.20 euros from the Valladolid City Council. . The president of the Valladolid Court of Instruction number 6 argued that it could not be proven that Zaitegui “entertained the Pont because of his public position, inviting him on a pleasure boat to Ibiza.”
José Luis Ábalos emphasizes in the interview with this newspaper – which he clarifies that “it is not a formal interview” but authorizes the dissemination of the content – on the legality of the purchase of masks from Soluciones de Gestión: “The contract has already been reviewed by the Court of Auditors, which has a jurisdictional section, and the prosecutor’s office has always said that this part is very good. In fact, the prosecutor, in order to retain the case before the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, stated that there had been no misappropriation of European funds because the goods had been delivered correctly and at prices below market prices.
He clarifies that the complaint is about corruption, criminal organization and money laundering, “but they consider the hiring to be good.” He says that the legal path of the document, which the PP filed with the National Court, is “zero, but the news is still in the air all these days.” The audit identified him as having doubled the order from four million masks to eight in just half an hour, because the company had warned that “either everything or nothing”. Ábalos does not remember why, but he is energetic: “I sign everything that is necessary to have the masks. It is imprudent to say that the state of alert lasted 15 days and was no longer justified. “There was no material of this type and we had to supply ourselves.” The former PSOE organizing secretary also points out that Soluciones de Gestión, the company involved in the plot, did not invoice in advance: “They did not have to demonstrate their solvency but to materialize it. The ministry paid once the material was delivered correctly, there was no risk of fraud because if they did not comply, they were not paid, and no company did that, which required payment in advance. He insists that the masks were good and well priced: “In the Community of Madrid, on those dates, they were bought at prices between three and six euros, and these cost us 2.5 euros each.”
José Luis Ábalos believes that the report commissioned by Puente “is not to collaborate with Justice, but to supplant it in parallel” and that it obeys a “political objective, to prosecute me”. He is convinced that the decision was made by Puente himself, “although he may have consulted something”. He also believes that this audit does not benefit Pedro Sánchez “because he is still the management of a socialist governmentbut I think there is no one in charge of anything anymore, you see the strategy and everything is reactive. “It’s very ugly in every way.”
