The Government had no choice but to make a statement Thursday evening on the report of the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, the UCO, which provides several revolutionary news on the Koldo affair and this brings a possible indictment of former minister José Luis Ábalos closer. And, as planned in advance, the Minister of Territorial Policy, Ángel Víctor Torres, appeared for the third time at a press conference on the same day on the occasion of the visit to Moncloa of three regional presidents: the Canarian Fernando Clavijo, Aragonese Jorge Azcón and Navarrese María Chivite.
Torres boasted of “maximum transparency” and recalled that at the time the PSOE expulsion file was opened for Ábalos, at the same time the certificate of his deputy was required, which he did not didn’t do it, moving to the Mixed Group. Furthermore, the minister, who was responsible for acting as spokesperson for the Executive, said that the visit of Delcy Rodríguez in January 2020, announced by Ábalos to Sánchez and for which the president gave his approval via SMS, was canceled once “the government confirms that there is a European Union sanction which prohibits the vice-president of Venezuela from entering the Schengen area.
But neither the minister nor government sources consulted by ABC specify when, in the four days between Ábalos’ message to Sánchez and Delcy’s arrival in Barajas, this cancellation took place. The proposed version, in addition, It is assumed that Sánchez was unaware the sanction that weighed on Rodríguez, who could not even set foot on Spanish soil. They also do not explain in the Executive whether Ábalos went to Madrid International Airport, where Koldo García took him as a driver, with the knowledge or even authorization of the President of the Government.
At that time, the current parliamentarian Mixto was one of the president’s trusted men, both at the table of the Council of Ministers, where he held one of the portfolios with the largest budget, and at the PSOE, where he was secretary of the Organization. And as such number 3 of the socialists. Until now, the version proposed is that it was a sudden visit and that once it was made, Ábalos went to the vice-president of Nicolas Maduro.
These sources admit, as Ábalos himself explained to Sánchez in the aforementioned message, that the visit was linked to the interests of Spanish companies in Venezuela, in particular of Duro Felguera.
“Zero worry”
Minister Torres avoided commenting on the contacts between the commissioner Víctor de Aldama, since this week in prison for hydrocarbon fraud, with Delcy Rodríguez, to whom he boasted, for example, that Sánchez had received the Venezuelan opponent Leopoldo Lopez in 2020. at the PSOE headquarters and not at Moncloa, thus reducing the institutional character of the meeting.
For the rest, Moncloa expresses its calm in the face of the revelations of the UCO report. “Zero worry”they go so far as to say in light of the revelations made on the eve of Sánchez’s visit to Pope Francis at the Vatican.
