“It seems clear that the required requirements were not met. The units to be acquired lacked justification. There is no rigor in the documentation. On August 23, in the Senate, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, described the internal audit that his ministry ordered in February after the outbreak of the “Koldo case.” Later, without naming them, he announced the dismissal of two senior officials he still had in his cabinet and who, in addition to being accused, were particularly harmed in this investigation.
They are the former Undersecretary of Transport, Jesús Manuel Gómez García, and the former Director General of People Management of Adif, Michaux Miranda Paniagua. Both, as well as the former Secretary General of State Ports Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares – dismissed from his post in March – will appear in the coming weeks as defendants before the judge of the National Court who is investigating the first case of alleged corruption in the purchase of medical supplies during the pandemic with government contracts. A plot that nestled within the government department, the second with the largest budget, and which was later led by José Luis Ábalos, a politician in whom Pedro Sánchez had great confidence and one of his essential allies for his return to the leadership of the PSOE. Miranda Paniagua and Sánchez Manzanares are summoned next Wednesday and Gómez García on September 23, after the judge postponed their statement after excluding the prosecution from their defense.
The audit, which the judge already has, speaks of “irregularities” in the contracts and points the finger at the management of Ábalos’ team, also highlighted by one of the accusations in the case, which requested his indictment after the report was written. public. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, is waiting for a report from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to decide whether to propose asking the Supreme Court to investigate the case. As he is a deputy – and therefore qualified – only the High Court can open proceedings against him. Since the PSOE excluded him from its ranks and from the parliamentary group of the Congress, he has been part of the mixed group.
Furthermore, Ábalos himself requested last week to appear in the case, but as a victim, and provided an expert report that attempts to refute the audit carried out on the orders of his successor, the current minister Óscar Puente, with whom he has broken off relations. In the letter addressed to the court, the former minister states that, although the investigator did not ask him for a “request for information” and he was not summoned “under any conditions”, “information and news continue to emerge that affect him personally and directly. The Prosecutor’s Office has also filed, at the request of the former minister, a complaint for the alleged leaks of the case.
The internal investigation of the current ministry limits the order to contract with the suspected company – Management Solutions – to Ábalos himself or his office. This is Koldo García, who went from being a brothel doorman or security guard, convicted of beatings, to being an advisor to Ábalos. Despite his poor preparation, Ábalos placed him as an administrator in two public companies. García’s brother and his wife also received money from the ministry or from public companies that depended on it.
According to the report, Transports doubled its first purchase of masks after the start of the pandemic in just 38 minutes. During that time, the ministry sent an order modifying an initial order of nearly four million masks to about eight. According to documents provided during the audit, the ministry ended up paying €20 million for that purchase, dated March 20, just a week after the government declared a state of alarm due to the pandemic situation.
“Pressures”
Regarding the three former senior officials who will soon appear before the judge, the anti-corruption prosecutor believes that “they could have exerted certain pressure on the heads of the entities that were to award the contracts for the supply of masks.” These are the two companies of the ministry that awarded the contracts for the land: Puertos del Estado and the railway company Adif.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office relies on a UCO report that alluded to the fact that these alleged pressures had taken place “without allowing or giving rise to the possibility of examining other offers or budgets” and “taking them for granted and without any possibility of refuting the final award decision” to the main company investigated in the case. A company that until 2017 had mainly dedicated itself to partnering with other companies and developing health and infrastructure projects in Africa, but when the masks arrived on the market, it had been inactive for several years. These are facts that, according to Anticorruption, could constitute the crime of influence peddling.
As for the former Secretary General of the State Ports, Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares, the UCO investigators revealed that he had direct contact with Víctor de Aldama, a businessman unrelated to the health sector, president of a third division football club – Zamora CF – and that he managed to find mask suppliers when the health crisis broke out. Aldama was playing with his cards marked. According to the summary of the file, the businessman knew that the mask contracts were going to be put out to tender before being approved. He thus earned 5.5 million euros, according to the investigators.
Regarding the former Undersecretary of Transport, Jesús Manuel Gómez García, the UCO pointed out that he seemed to act as a “transmission belt between the minister’s immediate sphere and the contracting entities.” An alleged involvement that contradicts what was stated in his testimony before the agents last February, when he assured that he had not participated “directly or indirectly” in the arbitrations. The anti-corruption group also described in the complaint that gave rise to the case a meeting at the seafood restaurant “La Chalana” in Madrid between Koldo García, Gómez García and the general director of the public company EMFESA.
Civil Guard investigators prepared this report after analyzing emails exchanged between January and July 2020 by nine senior officials from the Transportation and Interior Departments. All with the aim of finding out whether Koldo García and the businessmen involved in the plot maintained contact with the leaders of these departments during the period in which the million-dollar awards were made official. In the coming weeks, three of them will have the opportunity to explain themselves before the judge.
