The Minister of Transport and Sustainable Mobility, Óscar Puente, assures that only one of the public works contracts that according to the accused businessman Víctor de Aldama were “pre-awarded” was signed at the time when Ábalos was minister. For Puente, after the accusation of Aldama, the alleged ringleader of the illegal commissions plot investigated by the , There is an attempt to mock justice.
As Puente pointed out in Congress during the celebration of Constitution Day and then published in 2016 and June 2018), another contract of the socialist minister Raquel Sánchez (who was between July 2021 and November 2023) and only one contract of all those mentioned was signed in the time when José Luis Ábalos was at the head of the portfolio (between 2018 and 2020 as Minister of Development and then, until 2021, as Minister of Transport). The Government is working on a report to clarify the issue that will be published in the coming days. Puente also assured La Sexta upon leaving Congress: “What we are seeing, at least from the initial study, is that what he said makes no sense, neither head nor tail.”
Puente announced this Thursday that his team will “review” all public works contracts that according to Aldama were “pre-awarded” by . The minister, who yesterday was more than skeptical about the veracity of the accusations that Aldama has addressed in a letter to the Supreme Court, has advanced this Friday that the analysis of these agreements carried out by his ministry “is going to be bad news.” for Mr. Aldama” who, he said, “what he is doing is teasing the judge.” The assumption achiever of the plot presented in his brief to the magistrate some annexes to the General State Budgets with public works contracts, several of them supposedly highlighted because they were granted as consideration for the payment of commissions.
The minister downplayed Aldama’s accusations already this Thursday. “What I have been able to see (…) is an Official State Gazette, an underlined investment annex, as evidence it really has little value,” the minister insisted regarding the documentation provided by the defense of the accused businessman. Puente also recalled that the awarding of a contract is not a unilateral decision, but rather it is a process that “involves many people.” “I am surprised that it is said that the minister has the capacity to decide who is awarded a work; That is to say, they are contracting tables in which the State Attorney’s Office is present, intervention, there are a lot of technicians”, and that in them “neither the minister nor any politician are” present, so “it is very difficult” for the events occurred as Aldama relates them. “But let’s check,” he insisted.
José Luis Ábalos, former number three of the PSOE, former Minister of Transport in the Government of Pedro Sánchez and current deputy of the Mixed Group, is summoned to give a statement before the investigator of the case in the Supreme Court, Judge Leopoldo Puente, the next However, Ábalos has requested, in light of Aldama’s letter, that his appearance be postponed for a few days because he has had problems accessing the case and needs to be able to study it carefully. The appearances as defendants of Ábalos himself (December 16) and of Ábalos’s former assistant in the ministry Koldo García (December 17), who gives the informal name to the case, are also already scheduled.
One of the last movements of Judge Leopoldo Puente has been to reject, as his defense had requested, although he has not closed the door to carrying out that procedure later.