The summons as witnesses in the Supreme Court of a former manager and the person in charge of managing the PSOE cash is the latest pretext used by the PP to encourage suspicion about the irregular financing of the socialists. Magistrate Leopoldo Puente summons them on October 29 to explain the cash payments “without documentary support” that the party paid to the former minister and former Secretary of Organization of the party José Luis Ábalos and to his advisor Koldo García for five years. Last week, both took advantage of their right not to testify, so he could not question them on this issue, explains the judge.
The magistrate agrees to summon Mariano Moreno and Celia Rodríguez after the latest report from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard on Ábalos' assets found a mismatch of thousands of euros in payments to the former socialist leader and his right-hand man. As part of this asset investigation, the judge asked the PSOE to report all amounts paid or transferred to Ábalos, as well as possible donations from the former leader. The PSOE reported that it had paid 19,638 euros to Ábalos and 12,744 to Koldo García for settlements of expenses between 2017 and 2021. The payments were made by transfer or in cash that was delivered “through envelopes” at the Ferraz headquarters.
The investigators put this information in context with the messages and audios intercepted from Koldo García. And they concluded that, in some of them, reference was made to alleged deliveries of money by the party that had no “correspondence” with the figures that the PSOE had communicated to the Supreme Court. That is, those that were only referred to in those seized conversations. Five years of payments were analyzed and allusions to these imbalances were found in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
In its report, the UCO collects messages exchanged between Koldo García, his wife, Patricia Uriz, who was Ábalos' secretary in the Ministry of Transportation; and the PSOE worker Celia Rodríguez, now summoned by the judge; in which they mention different amounts of money that the party supposedly had to pay or had paid to the former minister and his advisor and that do not appear in the information provided by the socialists.
The sum of all the amounts mentioned in those messages is around 20,000 euros in five years, although there is no evidence that these amounts were finally paid or the concept. In fact, researchers have not offered a total figure for these “payments without documentary support.”
The only support that researchers have are the intercepted messages. In three of them, Patricia Uriz informs her husband that they have to go “collect” or “look for” money from Ferraz. And in another he alludes to an alleged payment of 8,000 euros to Koldo García, the origin of which is also unknown. This last message occurs in the context of a conversation between the two about what they needed to collect from “Ferraz” and a certain “Eduardo” who the agents do not identify. Celia Rodríguez, for her part, alludes in her communications with Koldo García to plane trips, hotel expenses, restaurant bills or other “expenses” that would have been “passed on” by Ábalos and Koldo García and that the former minister would have to “sign.”
The envelope with 826.73 euros
The UCO specified its suspicions in an example. This is an envelope addressed to Ábalos and that was collected in Ferraz by Koldo García's wife in June 2019. According to the information communicated by the party, it should contain 321.29 euros, coming from the box. However, the report includes a photograph of the envelope with PSOE letterhead that corresponds to that delivery and on which the figure of 826.73 euros appears handwritten.
It is a difference of 505.44 euros that the researchers consider “striking” and that they put in context with a conversation four months earlier in which Koldo García “seemed to recognize that, due to the position he held, he received one or two 500-euro bills monthly, known in common language as chistorra.” The PSOE explained that this envelope contained “321 euros declared as payment to Ábalos for his expenses and, secondly, 505 euros of maintenance expenses for the PSOE organizational team that accompanied Ábalos on his trips or party activities.” According to Ferraz, they are expenses “noted and justified in the PSOE's audited accounting.”
The image of the envelope with the party logo and the suspicions about the imbalance expressed by the UCO led the PP two weeks ago to talk about “parallel accounting” in the party that supports the Government. Alberto Núñez Feijóo's party has found in the Supreme Court's investigation the formula to endorse on the PSOE the accusations of which they were protagonists three decades ago, since the outbreak of the 'Gürtel case', and which ended in several judicial rulings that confirmed the illegal financing of the PP. Those court resolutions motivated the 2018 motion of censure that brought Pedro Sánchez to Moncloa, and have hampered the brand's electoral options.
Seven years later, Núñez Feijóo's party believes it has at hand the formula to be on par with the PSOE in corruption. This Monday, after learning of the summons from a former manager, he assured in a statement that “Moncloa and Ferraz insist on denying a B accounting that the Civil Guard already indicates in its latest report.” Something that the PP itself clarifies immediately afterwards by maintaining that in said report the researchers speak “of payments without documentary support.”
The PP cannot take a box B as true, and this is assumed by the statement itself, which points out that “there is no paper that rules out its existence and there is a lot of evidence that points in that direction.” The text tiptoes through the “evidence” and limits itself to demanding that “Sánchez, the former manager and the PSOE worker (also called to testify)” explain “how so much cash arrived at the party's national headquarters and how those bills ended up on the desk of the person who was the right-hand man of the President of the Government in his official residence.” A relationship between Ferraz's money and some images with alleged envelopes with money in Ábalos' office that does not appear in any report or document of the investigation.
“His silence on this matter is not tolerable when a businesswoman has already admitted in court to taking 90,000 euros in bags to Ferraz by order of Aldama,” the PP points out as second evidence, in reference to a statement by businesswoman Carmen Pano that she later did not verbalize in the Senate investigation commission.
Puente's decision coincides with the PP's push towards its strategy of harassing Pedro Sánchez for the legal cases that affect his party and part of his family. The former manager of the PSOE Mariano Moreno will testify in the Supreme Court on September 29, and a week before he will do so in the investigation commission of the 'Koldo case' that is being followed in the Senate.
And October 30, just 24 hours later, will be the day of Pedro Sánchez's own appearance in said commission. A year and a half after proclaiming it for the first time, Feijóo announced the summons to the President of the Government. The PP still does not reveal which senator will question the socialist leader.