José Luis Ábalos, Koldo García and businessman Víctor de Aldama will sit on the bench of the Supreme Court in the coming months for the alleged collection of commissions regarding the purchase of masks during the covid-19 pandemic. But the lawyer of the former Minister of Transport requested that the Criminal Chamber revoke the order to open the oral trial issued by Judge Leopoldo Puente and that the case be judged by a popular jury instead of seven judges of the Supreme Court. The court has not yet agreed on the composition of the court that will try the former socialist leader, but consulted sources suggest that the five judges who opened the trial against Ábalos in November 2024 will be joined, as expected, by the oldest judge of those who have not yet intervened in this case, the former state attorney general Julián Sánchez Melgar, and the most recent, Javier Hernández. These sources indicate, however, that the defense request will be studied.
Puente opened an oral trial on December 11 against the former Minister of Transport, his former advisor and the commission agent Aldama for integration into a criminal organization; ongoing corruption, active and passive; insider trading, taking advantage of inside information; influence peddling, embezzlement of public funds; falsity in an official document and prevarication. With this decision, adopted two weeks after sending Ábalos and Koldo García to temporary prison, the judge now leaves the case in the hands of the seven magistrates who will form the court that will judge them. But lawyer Carlos Bautista is trying to change to the extreme the procedure planned to prosecute the former minister and that the decision to convict or acquit him is not in the hands of the magistrates of the Criminal Chamber but of a popular jury ―composed of citizens drawn by lot―.
Bautista says the three main crimes attributed to Ábalos in the charges (bribery, influence peddling and embezzlement) are, according to the law, typical of a prosecution in jury court. He supports his request in two agreements of the superior court of 2010, according to which, even if other crimes which usually fall under the responsibility of professional judges are also tried (in this case, criminal organization and use of privileged information), the jurisdiction of the popular jury will be extended to them provided that they were committed with the main aim of committing a crime which corresponds to the court of the jury.
The lawyer argues that this circumstance is the one that occurs in the case against the former minister because the crime of criminal organization “was developed for the commission” of embezzlement, corruption and influence peddling, crimes within the jurisdiction of the jury court; and that of privileged information “is so closely linked in the factual narrative of the charges with the crimes within the jurisdiction of the jury court, that the continence of the case would be broken if tried separately.”
The sources consulted highlight some arguments that go against this request, such as the fact that the law that regulates the popular jury expressly excludes crimes that fall under the jurisdiction of the National Court, and this is where the investigation began and continues. Koldo affairwhose case before the Supreme Court is a split forced exclusively by Ábalos’ status as a congressman. These sources also warn that Judge Puente included in the oral opening order the offense of prevarication which, according to the law, cannot be tried in a jury court; and they draw attention to the fact that the defense did not raise this request in the appeal it presented against the order for which the former minister was being prosecuted.
The lawyer, in the petition registered at the Supreme Court, defends that the offenses that determine whether a case is judged by professional judges or by a popular jury are those included in the writings of the popular accusation and the Prosecutor’s Office, and these do not include prevarication; Likewise, according to Bautista, there is “no deadline” to require that the procedure be submitted to a popular jury. “This can be alleged at any time during the process, always before the start of the hearings or even during the processing of preliminary questions,” argues the lawyer.
The intention of the Criminal Chamber is to try Ábalos, Koldo García and Aldama during the first months of 2026, probably at the end of February or March. First, they must agree on the composition of the court, with the exception of a change of plan due to the request of Ábalos, which the consulted sources consider unlikely. The courts of first instance of the Supreme Court are composed of seven judges, five of whom constitute the Admission Chamber which opened the case being judged. In this case, the president of the Criminal Chamber, Andrés Martínez Arrieta; his predecessor in this position, Manuel Marchena; and judges Andrés Palomo, Ana Ferrer and Eduardo de Porres. The consulted sources point out that, following the distribution rules, it is foreseeable that the former Attorney General of the State Julián Sánchez Melgar and Javier Hernández will join, respectively, as the oldest magistrate in the courtroom and the most recent, of those who have not intervened in this case so far.
If this composition is confirmed, Ábalos, Koldo García and Aldama will have before them a veteran court composed of courtroom heavyweights, such as Arrieta, number one on the judicial ladder; Marchena, who, although he no longer presides over the Criminal Chamber, continues to have authority and great influence over the majority of its members; and Ferrer, the first woman to arrive in the room and who has just signed, with Susana Polo, a strongly dissenting vote against the conviction of the former state attorney general, Álvaro García Ortiz. Sánchez Melgar served as state attorney general during the final months of Mariano Rajoy’s government, while Palomo is another of the longest-serving judges in the courtroom and has also been in the spotlight recently for his opposition to the decision to seat the head of the public prosecutor’s office on the bench. De Porres and Hernández have joined the High Court in recent years and Ábalos’ would be the first highly relevant trial in which they would participate before the Supreme Court.
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