The former director of Acciona, Justo Vicente Pellegrini, and his subordinate, Tomas Olarte Sanz, denied on Wednesday in the Supreme Court the payment of kickbacks for public works grants by the Ministry of Transport during the term of José Luis Albalos. Legal sources present at the interrogation indicate that both declared that they were under investigation before Judge Leopoldo Puente and denied, as the Civil Guard claims, that the company had participated in an alleged scheme to falsify contracts by paying 2% of the amount of each award to the company Navarrese Servinabar, with which it participated in a joint venture for this business and in which the former organizing secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, Santos Cerdán, supposedly owned 45% of the shares. The Public Prosecution for Combating Corruption and Popular Accusations (represented by the Public Prosecutor) asked the judge to impose precautionary measures on the two people under investigation (withdrawing the passport, preventing them from leaving Spain, and appearing every 15 days before the judge).
Puente cited Pellegrini and Olarte as being under investigation after a Civil Guard report implicated them in the plot along with another company worker, José García Alconchel, who was cited on December 15. Agents point out that Pellegrini signed, in 2015, the first cooperation agreement between Acciona and Servinabar, Navarrese’s main company in the corrupt conspiracy, whose sole director is businessman Joseba Antixon Alonso, a friend of Cerdán. According to the UCO, Acciona obtained fraudulent awards through the influence of Cerdan, Abalos and his advisor Koldo Garcia, and the company then hired Servinabar’s services and agreed to pay him 2% of the net amount awarded. Agents believe that part of that money went to the two former Socialist leaders and the former assistant minister.
The former director of Acciona and his former subordinate, according to the sources consulted, have denied all the accusations and emphasized that the 2% they paid, according to the UCO, to Servinabar did not respond to commission but to payment for services rendered, which, they confirm, are certified with invoices. As they pointed out, Acciona contracted with Navares for the prevention of occupational risks in the business, and the 2% was not a fixed amount, but rather the “maximum” that was paid for these services.
Pellegrini admitted that he had a “personal” relationship with Antsun Alonso and that he dealt with Cerdán only as a “social agent”, while Olarte said that he maintained a “professional” relationship with the owner of “Cervinabar” and that he did not know the former organizing secretary of the PSOE.
The UCO report stressed that Antson Alonso and Pellegrini met on several occasions electronically and in person, with Cerdan present at least once. During these dates, according to investigators, they took “security measures” such as turning off their cell phones or talking through encrypted messaging apps like Threema. The former director of Acciona framed these meetings and the agreement signed in 2015 with Navarrese within the normal situation in the construction sector, but he qualified the findings of the Civil Guard, which included in its report two photographs of an alleged meeting between Pelegrini with Cerdán and Antxon Alonso, according to agents, of two meetings on two different days in June 2019. The former director confirmed that the photographs (one in the apartment of the owner Servinabar) (in Madrid and another in a bar in the capital) of the same day and correspond to a meeting they held for the Mina Moga project, the inauguration of the potash exploitation in Sanguesa (Navarrà) awarded to Acciona and in which Cervinábar participated.
Acciona fired the former construction director last June, a few days after the release of the report of the Central Operations Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard, which precipitated the accusation of Cerdán and revealed a conversation dating back to November 2023, already during Oscar Puente’s time at the Ministry of Transport, between Ábalos and his former advisor Koldo García, in which he told his boss: “Santos went to the Ministry of Transport.” Transportation to accommodate two people from Giusto, from Acciona. In response to a question about this statement, Vicente Pellegrini, according to sources, denied it.