The president of the government of Spain, the socialist Pedro Sánchez, admitted this Friday (11) that he knew about the trip that Delcy Rodríguez, vice-president of the Venezuelan dictatorship, had taken to Madrid to meet with ministers from his administration in January 2020.
According to information from the newspaper El Mundo, Sánchez said that his then Minister of Transport, José Luis Ábalos, “informed” him of Rodríguez’s visit and claimed that only later did he learn about the sanctions that prevented the deputy of Nicolás Maduro’s dictator from entering countries of the European Union.
According to the EFE agency, the Spanish government had previously informed that the Venezuelan vice-president would not have left the airport in Spain and, therefore, there would have been no violation of sanctions against her.
This Friday, however, Sánchez stated that when his government learned of the sanctions against Rodríguez, the visit was canceled.
The revelation comes in the context of the so-called Koldo case, in which suspicions of charging illegal commissions for the purchase of masks during the Covid-19 pandemic are being investigated.
According to the Spanish police, the coordinator of the scheme would be businessman Víctor de Aldama, linked to Ábalos and who had organized Rodríguez’s trip.
The investigation found that Aldama had taken advantage of his relations with Ábalos to “influence” the rescue of 475 million euros (paid with resources from the Spanish government’s Solvency Support Fund for Strategic Companies) from the airline Air Europa, in which the businessman was part of the advisory board in 2020.
Aldama would have acted as an intermediary in public contracts favoring third parties in other countries, mainly in Venezuela, investigators pointed out.
Sánchez claimed this Friday that his government has acted “forcefully, with determination and with conviction” against corruption and that in this case he asked Ábalos to resign his seat as deputy and opened a process to expel the former minister of the Socialist Party Spanish Worker (PSOE). He was suspended by the party in February.
Spain’s opposition called for Sánchez’s resignation. The leader of the conservative Popular Party (PP), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, said that corruption in the socialist government “is advancing at a frightening pace”.
“The number 1 of the conspiracy, Pedro Sánchez, has to resign and let the Spanish say at the polls whether they want more corruption or recover normality. By the way: lying in the Vatican counts twice as much”, wrote in X the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Díaz Ayuso (also from the PP), in reference to Sánchez’s visit to Pope Francis in the Vatican, where he spoke to journalists this Friday .
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