“Better alone than in bad company.” Santos Cerdán’s sentence, a few minutes after appearing this Wednesday before the Senate commission of inquiry into the Koldo affairsounded like a bad omen for his former socialist colleagues. UPN senator María Caballero had made him aware of his solitude from the moment he received it, unlike the cohort that accompanied him in April 2024, when he came to testify before the same commission, invested with all the powers of organizational secretary of the PSOE and without any criminal threat on the horizon. This time, the only one who came to shake his hand was the commission’s lawyer.
But if anyone expected Cerdán to attack his former boss, as José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García did, they were disappointed. The only reproaches that came out of his mouth were to regret that the party had “turned its back” on him. For the rest, he denied everything, including the document signed by him in which the businessman Antxon Alonso transferred to him 45% of the shares of the Servinabar company, winner of major public contracts. “I am innocent, I am not corrupt,” he proclaimed. The audios of his conversations with Ábalos and García, he argued, are manipulated by AI. And he was the victim of a conspiracy by “deep state resources” for negotiating with Junts and the nationalist left.
Thinner after his stay in prison, but with a healthy appearance and a firm attitude, Pedro Sánchez’s former number two arrived at the Campoamor room of the Senate 15 minutes early. During this time, he endures the uninterrupted images of the cameras, standing and impassive. He announced that he would use his right not to testify and he did so in the face of the most serious questions. Which does not mean that he remained silent or hesitated to confront the PP senators, with very tense moments that caused a brief suspension of the confrontation. When he left the room, more than two and a half hours had passed.
The popular Gerardo Camps also wanted to exploit the visible distance that his former colleagues marked with the man who, until six months ago, headed the party apparatus. Cerdán regretted it, but cut Camps off: “To defend my innocence, no one needs to accompany me.” The most that the popular achieved was to leave unanswered the question of whether Sánchez had participated in a meeting with him and Arnaldo Otegi to negotiate the motion of censure in 2018, a meeting that the president and the leader of EH Bildu deny. What the former Navarrese leader responded to was the question of whether the PSOE was financed illegally during the seven years of his stay in Ferraz. And he was terse: “No, I assure you completely.” Similarly, he said Sánchez’s campaign in the 2016 socialist primaries was fueled exclusively by contributions from activists.
The presence of someone who represented almost everything in the PSOE represented a role for the socialist group. It was Alfonso Gil’s turn to take care of it, who immediately admitted: “It’s one of the most difficult interventions of my life.” Gil, a Basque senator, did not ask him any questions. And he did his best not to provoke dangerous reactions. He highlighted his respect for the presumption of innocence at the criminal level, while formulating an “ethical reproach” and considering that activism is “fraudulent”. He ended with a quote from Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba: “If you don’t live the way you think, you end up thinking the way you live.” The enigmatic response seemed threatening: “I don’t know if you are in a position to reproach me the way you did. »
The appearance began with the most exhaustive and structured questioning, that of the UPN senator. Caballero left almost nothing out: the allegedly rigged contracts, the presence of direct relatives on Servinabar’s payroll, the company card he allegedly used for personal expenses, the origin of the money to pay for his penthouse in Madrid… The former socialist oscillated between silence and denying everything.
Cerdán said he suffered “a persecution typical of the Inquisition” based on “police hypotheses without any kind of certainty.” He has repeatedly referred to an expert report commissioned by his defense, which concludes that audios of his conversations with Ábalos and Koldo are manipulated with a software which did not even exist in 2018, when these dialogues date. There, he began to escape his conspiracy theory to present himself as a victim of judges and police officers who had conspired to take revenge for his actions and his party.
The Navarrese politician felt strengthened when Vox senator Ángel Pelayo Gordillo criticized him for his relationships with “putschists, separatists and heirs of ETA”:
-You are right: everything comes from there.
To argue this alleged collusion, he mentioned on several occasions – and despite the interventions of the president of the commission, Eloy Suárez, to put an end to it – the contacts between the leaders of Vox and the members of the Civil Guard.
Those who gave some support to Cerdán’s theories were the Catalan separatists. Neither Joan Queralt, of ERC, nor Eduard Pujol, of Junts, questioned the accusations of corruption, but they made it known that the alleged plot, in the words of the latter, “does not seem to be a simple literary creation”. Cerdán saw the sky open to locate the origin of his troubles: his image with Carles Puigdemont in Brussels after negotiating the inauguration agreement on behalf of Sánchez. “There’s a before and after in this photo,” he said. Pujol insists:
-So everything was born from this cheating, rotten and sick State…?
-A Senate committee could investigate this. I don’t know.
-But are you clean, clean?
-The State?
-No, you.
-I do.
The former socialist displayed his defiant attitude when the PP’s turn came. He then tried to use another case to support his thesis: the hiring by the Community of Madrid of a Civil Guard captain, Juan Vicente Bonilla, who in a recording boasted of having information against Ábalos and Koldo. Between the committee chairman forbidding him from broaching the subject and Senator Camps insisting on asking questions at the top of his voice, an outcry arose and the questioning was briefly suspended. Camps, always with thunderous volume, expanded on the relationship between Cerdán and Ábalos without getting a response. By then, the socialist was already staring into space and ignoring the questions, while he scribbled in a notebook or typed on his laptop with a melancholy expression.
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