“It seems clear that the required requirements were not met. There was a lack of justification for the units to be acquired. There is no evidence of rigour in the documentation.” On 23 August, the Minister of Transport, Óscar Puente, outlined in the Senate the internal audit that his department had commissioned in February after the outbreak of the ‘Koldo case’. Afterwards, without naming them, he announced the dismissal of two senior officials that he still had in his cabinet and who, in addition to being accused, came out particularly badly in that investigation.
They are the former Undersecretary of Transport, Jesús Manuel Gómez García, and the former General Director of People Management at Adif, Michaux Miranda Paniagua. Both of them and the former Secretary General of State Ports, Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares – dismissed 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 took place in the government department, the second with the largest budget, and which was then headed by José Luis Ábalos, a politician who was Pedro Sánchez’s most trusted and one of his essential allies for the 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 his statement after removing the State Attorney’s Office from his defense.
The audit, which is already available to the judge, speaks of “irregularities” in the contracts and points to the management of Ábalos’ team, also singled out by one of the accusations in the case, which requested his indictment after the report was made public. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, for its part, is waiting for a report from the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to decide whether to propose asking the Supreme Court to investigate him. As he is a member of parliament —and, therefore, protected— only the High Court can open a case against him. Since the PSOE expelled him from its ranks and from the Parliamentary Group in Congress, he has been part of the Mixed Group.
Meanwhile, Ábalos himself asked last week to appear in the case, but as a victim, and provided an expert opinion that attempts to refute the audit carried out by order of his successor, the current minister Óscar Puente, with whom he has broken relations. In the document addressed to the court, the former minister argues that despite the fact that the investigating judge has not requested “any information” nor has he been summoned “in any capacity”, “information and news that affect him personally and directly” continue to appear. The Prosecutor’s Office has also filed, at the request of the former minister, a complaint for the alleged leaks in the case.
The internal investigation of the current ministry limits the order to contract with the company under suspicion – Gestión Solutions – to Ábalos himself or to his office. That is, to Koldo García, who went from being a brothel doorman or security guard, convicted of beating people, to Ábalos’ advisor. Despite his poor training, Ábalos placed him as an advisor in two public companies. García’s brother and his wife also received money from the ministry or from public companies dependent on it.
According to the report, Transport doubled the first purchase of masks after the outbreak of the pandemic in just 38 minutes. During that time, the department sent an order that modified an initial order of almost four million masks to about eight. According to the documents provided in the audit, the Ministry ended up paying 20 million euros for that purchase, dated March 20, just one week after the Government declared a state of emergency due to the pandemic situation.
“Pressures”
Regarding the three former senior officials who will soon appear before the judge, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office considers that “they could have exerted certain pressures on the people responsible for the entities that had to award the contracts for the supply of masks.” That is, the two companies within the ministry’s scope that awarded contracts to the network: Puertos del Estado and the railway operator Adif.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office is basing this on a report from the UCO which alluded to the fact that these alleged pressures would have taken place “without allowing or giving rise to the examination of other offers or budgets” and “assuming and without any option to challenge the final decision of award” to the main company investigated in the case. A company that until 2017 had been mainly dedicated to associating with other companies and developing health and infrastructure projects in Africa, but which had been inactive for several years when it made the big splash with the masks. These are facts that, according to Anticorruption, could fit within the crime of influence peddling.
Regarding the former Secretary General of Puertos del Estado, Álvaro Sánchez Manzanares, the UCO investigators revealed that he maintained direct contact with Víctor de Aldama, a businessman outside the health sector, president of a third division football club – Zamora CF – and who managed to find suppliers of masks when the health crisis broke out. Aldama played with marked cards. According to the summary of the case, the businessman knew that the contracts for masks were going to be put out to tender before they were approved. With this, he earned 5.5 million euros, according to the investigators.
Regarding the former Undersecretary of Transport, Jesús Manuel Gómez García, the UCO stressed that he seemed to act as a “transmission belt between the minister’s inner circle and the awarding bodies”. An alleged involvement that clashes with what he stated in his statement as a witness before the agents last February, when he assured that he had not participated “directly or indirectly” in the awards. Anti-corruption 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.
The Civil Guard investigators produced this report after analysing the emails exchanged between January and July 2020 by nine senior officials from Transport and Interior. All with the aim of finding out whether Koldo García and the businessmen involved in the scheme maintained contact with executives from these departments during the period in which the multi-million-dollar contracts were formalised. In the coming weeks, three of them will have the opportunity to explain themselves before the judge.
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