The Supreme Court sets in motion the machinery to formally investigate former Minister José Luis Ábalos. The instructor of the ‘Koldo case’ in the high court, Leopoldo Puente, issued an order this Wednesday in which he agreed to submit a request to the Congress of Deputies to suspend his immunity and thus be able to proceed criminally against him. The magistrate considers that after the procedures carried out so far there are “sufficient indications” of the possible commission of at least four crimes: integration into a criminal organization, influence peddling, bribery and embezzlement.
Puente considers that there are “sufficient elements” to consider that Ábalos was able to take advantage of his status as minister to determine “the awarding of several contracts of the public administration or the institutional public sector with private companies” in exchange for “certain economic benefits.” It is based, for this, on the statement that the former minister gave voluntarily last week, as well as the interrogations of his former advisor Koldo García and the alleged achiever of the plot, Víctor de Aldama; the documents provided by them and the results of the searches and telephone taps authorized during the investigation initiated at the National Court.
The magistrate maintains that thanks to his “personal relationship” with Ábalos and Koldo García, the businessman Aldama was able to have “prior information” about the needs derived from the urgency in the acquisition of medical supplies in the worst of the pandemic and that this allowed him make an offer that would ensure the award, which was the fact that gave rise to these investigations. However, the judge affirms that this “procedure” could also have been used “before and after” to achieve other contracts between companies and individuals with the public and/or institutional Administration, which gives some support to the accusations launched by Aldama regarding the public works rigging.
The magistrate does not give credibility to what was stated by Ábalos, who denied having declared bites. Thus, Puente understands that the answers given by the former minister in court “do not agree” with the evidence contained in the case and that “are specified in different documents and statements.”
In this sense, the judge identifies three perks from which “it appears indicatively justified” that Ábalos would have benefited: the payment of the rent for the apartment where his partner resided; the arrangement of a rental with an option to purchase a villa on the coast of Cádiz and another rental contract with an option to purchase an apartment located on Paseo de la Castellana for a sale price of 750,000 euros that the magistrate considers “apparently much lower than the market.”
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