The Court of Auditors opened an investigation into indications that the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), dependent on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs headed by José Manuel Albares, had incurred accounting liability for unjustified payments corresponding to … by 2023 (even if they were dragging since 2016) for a value of 21.7 million euros.
The Third Prosecutor’s Office saw sufficient reasons to continue the investigation procedure into possible irregularities. On December 15, as ABC learned, the delegate in charge of the investigation, Mercedes Santamaría, was appointed, who will take care of the case to see if the facts relate to public funds or effects.
The “scope of application”, according to article 72 of the Law relating to the functioning of the Court of Auditors, is “the unjustified debit balance of an account or, in general terms, the absence of a figure or justification in the accounts which must be rendered by the persons responsible for the management of funds or public securities, whether or not they have the status of accountants before the Court of Auditors”.
The possible irregularities began to be corrected in April of this year, when, according to the legal proceedings of which this newspaper was aware, signs of accounting responsibility were noted in the declaration on the General State Account for the 2023 financial year approved by the Plenary Assembly of the Court of Auditors in its session of April 28, 2025.
In July, the prosecutor’s office and the attorney general’s office considered it necessary to investigate the facts. Now they are asking for the file.
In July, both the public prosecutor’s office at the Court of Auditors and the public prosecutor’s office deemed it necessary to appoint an investigator to investigate the facts. However, on July 23, the AECID – chaired by the Secretary of State for International Cooperation, Eva Granadosand led by Anton Leis Garcia– presented a written statement of the allegations and new documents. Later, in October, the prosecutor and the public defender requested that the proceedings be archived.
The accounting consultant to whom the matter was addressed saw that the economic management of AECID, in particular the unjustified payment orders of 21.7 million corresponding to 2023, could constitute the domain of public funds and that they should be investigated, which is why he decided to move forward by appointing an investigating delegate.
AECID allegations
The International Development Cooperation Agency justified the delay in payment by the fact that the Foreign Affairs Agency has a “complex network”, with 53 cooperation offices attached to embassies and equipped with “insufficient” technical staff.
He recalled that, following the instructions of the Court of Auditors, the AECID Board of Directors approved in March 2014 a specific plan for the examination and approval of supporting accounts, as well as that in the new AECID Statute, approved last year, the sub-directorate of Procedural Control and Risk Management was created to strengthen the control and monitoring capacities for the justification of accounts and that the new account review units maintain direct contact with the cooperation offices. and embassies responsible for management and payment orders.
“An obviously relevant figure”
For the prosecution of the Court of Auditors, these allegations “do not distort the reality which justified the opening of the procedure”, according to the order with which it was decided to move forward, consulted by this newspaper. For the Court of Auditors, this is an “obviously relevant” figure (21.7 million euros). The AECID’s allegations, considers the control body, “do not provide information on the status of the processing of the respective files, on the situation or the meaning of the reports of the Delegated Intervention or on possible specific reasons for non-compliance with the deadlines set for the annual rendering of accounts”.
The control body justifies that this is an “obviously relevant” figure and that the AECID’s allegations are not sufficient
For the court, “even if a considerable part of this volume of unjustified payments, one year and seven months after the term in which they should have been made, responds to a simple delay, the obscurity which reigns overall does not allow the archiving requirement to be considered as satisfied”. Hence the Third floor decided to continue the procedure according to the criteria of the prosecution and the legal profession.
The AECID is required to declare and justify its income and expenses before the Court of Auditors, the public accounts control body which controls state entities to ensure their legality and good management.
“Deficiencies and irregularities in 2016”
This is not the first time that the Court of Auditors has warned against the management of the AECID. In 2019, the supervisory body published a report on the 2016 accounts (from which, according to the open investigation, unjustified payments were carried over) in which it warned of “very significant deficiencies and non-conformities” in cooperation grants and loans.
The organization highlighted the fact that the Cooperation Agency suffered from deficiencies such as “the absence and insufficiency of economic justification, the presentation of supporting documents for expenditure outside the set deadlines, the existence of discrepancies in the execution of the budget for subsidized actions, as well as the non-achievement of the objectives set in the projects presented”. He also insisted that the national subsidy database did not collect relevant and necessary information, such as 391 recipients of grants worth more than 5 million euros.
Today, the control body, with regard to the payments made by AECID, goes even further and opens an accounting perimeter procedure which is taking its first steps. In addition to the allegations and documentation already presented, the public body must provide all the explanations required by the public accounts auditor.
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