Spain: the mask corruption scandal now complicates Pedro Sánchez in Congress

The collateral damage of alleged corruption in the purchase of masks during the pandemic affects the PSOE affect the delicate balance that Pedro Sánchez’s coalition government maintains in Parliamentwhere getting approval for each of his proposals is becoming a litmus test.

Because after trying to force the resignation of deputy José Luis Abalos – former secretary of the party organization and former head of the Ministry of Transport – to leave his post, The former minister’s refusal complicates the government.

The ministry led by Abalos is said to have carried out the hiring of irregular commissions whoever was his closest advisor would have benefitedKoldo Garcia Izaguirre.

At noon on Tuesday, the 24-hour deadline given by the socialists to Abalos was respected. “We are not judges, nor prosecutors, nor do we judge but we believe there is a political responsibility and we hope that the delivery of the (MP’s) report will take place in the next 24 hours,” PSOE executive spokeswoman Esther Peña said on Monday.

But Abalos not only did not resign from Congress. On Tuesday he called a press conference in which he announced that he will remain a deputy – since the seat belongs to him and not to the political party he represents – and that he will go alone to the mixed group which is the one formed by the parties that do not have a representation of 15 deputies.

Today the mixed group is made up of the five seats of Podemos, that of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, that of the Navarro Popular Union and that of the Canary Islands Coalition.

“I’m innocent”

“I cannot end my political career or my career as a corrupt person.” when I’m innocentAbalos said this on Tuesday.

“If I resigned it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness,” he clarified. For now there are no charges against him.

“Given the need to defend myself and restore my honor as a deputy and as a person and given the need not to compromise the socialist parliamentary group, I have decided to move to the mixed group of the Congress of Deputies from where I will continue to defend the ideas they founded the beginning of my political activism,” Abalos said.

One less deputy

His departure from the ranks of the PSOE reduces the socialist presence in Congress. From Tuesday the Pedro Sánchez party It has 120 deputies.

It may seem like a minimal setback in the bloc of 179 MPs from eight parties that gave him an absolute majority to be re-elected in November last year.

But if you look a little harder, Sánchez He obtained his third investiture in exchange for agreement with such dissimilar parties like the Catalan and Basque independentists, both right and left, who do not make governability easy.

Furthermore, Podemos’ farewell to the coalition of left-wing parties -Sumar- created by the current Minister of Labor Yolanda Díaz in 2022, has reduced its parliamentary group: of the 31 seats Sumar obtained in the general elections of July last year, Today he is 26.

The lawyer who reported

Clarion he contacted the lawyer Ramiro Grau, who was the first to denounce the corrupt plot who would be behind the contracts for the purchase of masks from China and from whose commissions the right-hand man of former minister Abalos, Koldo García Izaguirre, would have benefited.

He was an advisor to the former minister and on February 20 he was arrested in Alicante by the Guardia Civil. And although he was released two days later, he is under investigation for allegedly cashing in illegal commissions in the purchase of medical supplies for the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Transport and for the autonomous island communities, those of the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands.

García Izaguirre was a security guard and driver. In addition to being his advisor, Abalos appointed him director of Renfe Mercancías, the Spanish public railway company.

In two years his assets increased by 1.5 million euros.

“We have been reporting it since 2020,” he says Clarion Grau, who discovered that a company in Zaragoza, the city where he lives, “which had no activity and which in 2019 had zero euro turnover, had become the exclusive supplier of the Ministry of Transport”.

But no one listened to his complaint. “Abalos was second in the party, he was a minister and no one dared to make fun of him“, Grau justifies that his complaint was unsuccessful.

Ten letters to Pedro Sánchez

The lawyer clarifies that he sent ten letters addressed directly to the president of the government. He never received a reply.

“Now Abalos is a simple deputy and has lost a lot of strength or ability to pressure and influence,” Grau believes.

“And I also want to think that the Special Prosecutor’s Office against corruption and organized crime, which is the one dealing with the issue, is a body that does its job well”, he assures. In the end they are the ones who listened to me.”

“Paying homage to the right, as I believe the political leadership of my party does, will not stop the right from continuing its hunt beyond me,” Abalos said as he confessed that he had no intention of giving up his seat.

The People’s Party has already announced it will present a complaint against the PSOE to the European Prosecutor’s Officethe European Anti-Fraud Office and the European Commission.

The corruption case being investigated continues to be a thorn in the side of Pedro Sánchez, who set foot in La Moncloa for the first time in June 2018 when he evicted Mariano Rajoy, in fact, with a motion of censure for corruption within the People’s Party.

“We are a government that was born from the need to put an end to the corruption of the previous administration and that has made exemplarity its flag,” Sánchez said over the weekend, during the meeting in Madrid of the Socialist International that he chaired.

“The fight against corruption must be incessant -he added in front of socialist representatives from hundreds of countries-. Wherever it comes from and whoever falls falls.”