The Supreme Court magistrate who investigated and prosecuted former minister José Luis Ábalos, his Transport advisor Koldo García and businessman Víctor de Aldama is bringing the three men to justice. The instructor gave the order to open the trial … against the three accused of criminal organization, continuous active and passive corruption, embezzlement, influence peddling, use and exploitation of privileged information and falsification of documents.
The judge keeps Ábalos and Koldo García in preventive detention while waiting for them to be put in the dock, seeing the risk of flight due to the heavy penalties they face and imposes a bail of 60,000 euros on them in order to ensure the financial responsibilities that, ultimately, could be imposed on them. If they do not pay within five days, they could have their property seized.
The magistrate notified the decision both to the accused, whose defenders will be able to present their briefs in ten days, and to Congress, since Ábalos continues to be a deputy despite the fact that yesterday he was suspended from salary and participation in commissions.
The next step for the High Court will be to announce the date of the trial, during which The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office requests 24 years in prison against the Valencian politician19 and a half for Koldo García and seven for Víctor de Aldama.
In his lengthy indictment, Anti-Corruption Attorney General Alejandro Luzón explained how, since their meeting, shortly after Pedro Sánchez’s arrival in La Moncloa, Ábalos, Koldo and Aldama quickly saw the possibility of creating an allegedly criminal triangle that would bring them economic benefits.
The businessman paid bribes of all kinds (from cash deliveries worth an estimated two and a half million euros to vacation rentals or the apartment of the former minister’s partner, Jésica Rodríguez, in the center of Madrid) in exchange for privileged treatment in the awarding of contracts for the delivery of medical supplies to Spain during the pandemic. Management Solutions, the company he represented, won contracts from the Ministry of Transport through Puertos del Estado or Adif, among other public companies, worth 53 million euros.
The Prosecutor’s Office highlighted this “effective distribution of functions” so that the criminal triangle was possible and Koldo García, as the “alter ego” of the minister of his department, who, in turn, was placed as a person of confidence by the former organizational secretary of the PSOE Santos Cerdán, also investigated alongside them as a member of a criminal organization in a plot of allegedly fraudulent attributions to Acciona. The investigation into this branch of the investigation, which led Cerdán to five months of preventive detention, is advancing before the Supreme Court under the leadership of the Anticorruption and the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard.
(EXPANDING NEWS)
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