After keeping the mystery until the end, the person in charge of interrogating Pedro Sánchez was the PP spokesperson on the commission and one of Alicia García's main collaborators, Alejo Miranda de Larra. The now senator was general director of Madrid's Health Infrastructures during the pandemic — until 2021 — and, therefore, politically responsible for the Isabel Zendal Hospital, the “pandemic hospital” that Isabel Díaz Ayuso ordered to be built during COVID and that was going to “surprise the world.”
The center was built in record time. The real cost, according to the data that elDiario.es has collected and analyzed from all the contracts that have been made public, exceeded 170 million euros, triple what was announced. Zendal's cost overruns, only in relation to construction works, amounted to 149% of the total. And, since then, around another 15 million annually have to be added for its maintenance. Today, after going through different functions, the hospital “that was going to surprise the world” is a center that “provides support to the entire hospital network in the event of any health crisis or healthcare need.”
Sánchez has precisely referred to his time in charge of the construction in his reply to the senator: “I wish all administrations would strengthen public health and not privatize it, as in the Community of Madrid. You know this well because you were in charge of the construction of the Zendal hospital. By the way, I would still have to clarify something about hiring,” he responded, to which Miranda simply said that he is not “the subject of the commission.”
However, in his first intervention, the PP senator dedicated himself to talking about himself and, specifically, his hospital admission during one of the first waves of COVID-19. It was in October 2020 when, as he himself said at the time, he was admitted to a hospital for bilateral pneumonia caused by the coronavirus. “While we were dying from Covid, his colleagues were trying to get rich,” he told Sánchez at the beginning of his interrogation.
In 2021 he left the directorate of Health Infrastructures of the Community of Madrid and became in charge of Investments and Local Development until 2023. He joined the second level of the PP directorate in 2022. Since then, he has been secretary of the Executive of Alberto Núñez Feijóo and has shared the spokesperson of the Senate with Alicia García. In recent months, his face has become better known as he served as spokesperson in the Senate investigation commission in which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, appeared this Thursday. It was he who, for example, justifies the continuous extensions of said commission, which the PP has turned into a catchall against the Government, “not because of a political strategy, but because of a commitment to the citizens”, because, “corruption is not covered up, it is fought.”
“The truth is not hidden, it is revealed and responsibility is not evaded, it is assumed,” he stated last March. Beneficiary of the roller that the PP enjoys in the Upper House, Miranda obtained the extension of the commission's work for six more months, until September, and another extension of another half year, which is what has allowed Sánchez to appear on the penultimate day of October. “We are not going to stop investigating,” he has often argued, thus justifying that the commission has become the place in which the main opposition party addresses all kinds of issues to try to wear down the Executive, talking about issues such as Venezuela, Sánchez's wife or even Leire Díez.
In the session prior to this Thursday and without yet listening to Sánchez, Miranda considered it proven that “it is very clear” that “there is corruption” in the Government and asked himself: “How far do the ramifications go and how many more socialists and high-ranking officials in the Government will fall?” In his opinion, only judicial investigation, honest officials and the work of investigative commissions like this one will be able to put an end to this plot that has squandered the public coffers of Spain.”