The former minister and former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, José Luis Ábalos, is determined to change the strategy that his defense has followed until now in the call Koldo case and to do so he is determined to hire another lawyer, although he has not yet decided whether to do so before. What the former socialist leader is clear about is that he wants to continue as a deputy in Congress, according to sources close to him, and thus preserve his seat. Ábalos defends that he does not have to incriminate himself or reach any type of agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office, because he considers himself innocent, and believes that the Supreme Court has no legal basis to resolve his imprisonment.
What he does not want to communicate, yet, is which lawyer he will go to, as he is obliged, this week for his new statement before the Supreme Court magistrate Leopoldo Puente, who has called him under investigation, as well as his former advisor Koldo García, given the conclusions of the assets report that he has provided. “He continues to value it,” those around the former minister point out.
What has been resolved is that the report provided to the investigation, despite the media and political noise caused by some recordings and indications about his participation in the bribery scheme established in the Ministry of Transportation during his time, “has more noise than content.”
Ábalos is considering changing lawyers because he does not agree with the defense strategy that his current lawyer is following throughout this process. And among these divergences he includes “the entire environment of pressure that is being experienced and endured since the UCO report on Santos Cerdán became known in June until the attempts to pressure him to reach an agreement with the Prosecutor’s Office” or what he considers “misrepresentations” and “inferences” to incriminate him in some conversations between the main people involved in that plot.
Judge Puente, however, has understood from the UCO document that “it deepens the evidence of criminality that was already present” in the case that Ábalos and his former assistant “could have maintained non-transparent methods of communication between themselves” of their respective assets, “indiscriminately receiving irregular and opaque income from diverse sources, possibly as a result of the commission” of the rigging of public contracts.
The former minister has even commented in those around him that he does not understand why he would have to incriminate himself, as the businessman and corrupting link in the plot, Víctor de Aldama, did at the time, because he is absolutely convinced of his innocence. Although the UCO report concludes that the former leader of that party argues that these amounts “are not of unknown origin” and that he will be able to demonstrate in the future trial “where these amounts in cash come from.”
Neither the UCO report nor the judge’s order mentions irregular financing of the PSOE or bonuses, as the PP repeatedly denounces. The PSOE affirms that these cash payments given to the former minister and his former advisor were “for justified expenses” and that they are approved by the Court of Accounts.
The former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE investigated what he has forcefully conveyed to the few people with whom he collaborates these days is that he has no plans in any way to give up his seat as a deputy in Congress, now within the heterogeneous Mixed Group. He maintains, according to these sources, that this decision would weaken his new defense strategy, which from now on involves going on a counterattack because he is convinced that there is “a political operation” behind it.
One of the big differences with his current defense has been, precisely, that he is not willing to give up the record of deputy that facilitates his status as a member of parliament and being able to be tried by the Supreme Court despite the pressure he says he is receiving in that regard. He argues that renouncing that position, and becoming judicially dependent on the National Court, as would be the case, would mean “further delaying or postponing the trial” and has discussed with his lawyer that this position would not benefit him “now that the case is deflating” as a consequence of public knowledge of a Civil Guard report that he sees as “biased and malicious.”
Ábalos has even commented, in this sense, that at the end of the case it will be seen that not even the level of the gaps in the amounts not duly justified will reach the almost 95,000 euros estimated by the UCO before the judge.
The now parliamentarian of the Mixed Group is also convinced that Judge Puente of the Supreme Court will not have any possibility of decreeing his entry into prison after his new judicial declaration this week, as has been speculated in recent days, because he maintains that it is not so simple to send a deputy to prison and because none of the three requirements that he has discussed with his current defense are met: he understands that in his case there is no risk of escape due to the time elapsed. without having tried at any time and because he complies every day on the first and 15th of the month with the precautionary measures of going to court, because there is no possibility of destroying evidence after all the searches carried out at his home and, finally, because there is no possibility of repetition of the crimes charged, given the proven fact that he no longer has any of the high positions that he once held.
