The Interior Minister, the magistrate in leave Fernando Grande-Marlaska, has promoted in just over two months two files to prohibit the use of the cross of the Order of the Merit of the Civil Guard to two investigated in the Koldo case, a plot of corruption linked to the acquisition of sanitary material during the pandemic.
In December, the procedure began to prevent this Víctor de Aldama medal, the alleged arrest for the plot. As confirmed by sources from the Ministry, the General Directorate of the Civil Guard has instructed a file to determine “if it is appropriate to prohibit the use of the distinction” awarded the company by Marlaska himself in 2022.
This medal rewards “actions or behaviors of extraordinary relief that result in the prestige of the body and interest of the homeland.” According to the ministerial order that regulates this distinction, approved in 2012, they may wear the great cross “on the uniform or in the civil suit” members of the Civil Guard Corps, but also “any other person or entity that is creditor of it.”
As transcended two week in various media, the Interior Minister also intends to take away the recognition that in May 2018 granted his predecessor in office, Juan Ignacio Zoido, to the person who gives name to the Koldo case, Koldo García, who was an advisor to José Luis Ábalos in Transportes.
The General Directorate of the Civil Guard has opened a file in the same direction at the proposal of Marlaska, which he considers, “without prejudging the judicial resolution that ends the cause”, that the investigation opened to the ex -asor of Ábalos “shows an attentive conduct to the prestige” of the Civil Guard.
Therefore, the Armed Institute has opened files to prohibit the use of the medal (the final decision is in the hands of the minister) to people who hold the status of investigated in a judicial case (with a self -incult in the case of Victor de Aldama).
However, it maintains the distinction to a prisoner, former corrupt Salvador Alba, sentenced to six and a half years in jail for judicial prevarication, bribery and falsehood in public document. Crimes he committed when conspiring against Victoria Rosell when the magistrate appeared to the 2015 general elections as independent in the ranks of Podemos for Las Palmas.
“We do not offer information on internal procedures that, in any case, corresponds to the State Security Forces and Bodies,” official sources from the Ministry of Interior have answered this newspaper when asked for the reasons why this file has not been opened to Alba, sentenced firmly since November 2021.
Alba was awarded in 2014 by the government of Mariano Rajoy, when he served as a magistrate of the Sixth Section of the Provincial Court of Las Palmas. The then judge began to investigate two years later, in May 2016, after disseminating a recording in which he is heard preparing the judicial headquarters of an entrepreneur who was then investigated on facts outside the object of that procedure and with the objective of ending the professional and political career (incipient at that time) of Rosell, the judge to which Alba had replaced the front of the Court of Instruction 8 of the Palmas of the Palmas.
Those investigations concluded in the firm conviction to Salvador Alba. Apart from the penalty of prison (six and a half years in prison) and disqualification (18 years), the imposition of a fine of 12,000 euros and the obligation to compensate the victim of their crimes with 60,000 euros for moral damages, the sentence ordered the withdrawal “of all honors attached to her status as a judge.”
However, almost nine years after the investigation against him began and more than two years after he entered the jail, Salvador Alba keeps the medal and can wear it.
At the end of 2022, coinciding with the prison entrance of the former Magistrate, a senator of Compromís (Carles Mulet) asked the government, in relation to the Alba case, for the measures that it was going to adopt “well on its own initiative, well in coordination with the Civil Guard, to withdraw the cross of the order” to all those people to whom it had been granted and that, afterwards, it would have been contained in exemplary behavior requirements ”.
In his response, the Government pointed out that “each of the proposals and concessions of rewards of the Order of the Merit of the Civil Guard corresponds to individual and independent administrative acts, whose motivation of proposal addresses some merits and unique circumstances, concurrent at a specific temporal moment, whose veracity has been attested in the course of the corresponding administrative file.”
In addition, he referred to the Democratic Memory Law of October 19, 2022 and, more specifically, at its additional addition, which stipulates that the Council of Ministers or the Minister of the Interior may review ex officio or revoke the resolutions that this medal has granted even when they had been produced prior to the entry into force of that rule.
The sources of the Interior Ministry have now specified, to questions from this newspaper, that the Ministerial Order does not contemplate the withdrawal of the medal, although its prohibition of use, without giving details about the particular case of Salvador Alba.
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