A complaint received in July 2022 alerted the Tax Agency to possible irregularities in the renovations of Vocational Training educational centers in the Community of Madrid. When the Treasury took an interest in the matter, through a request sent on January 9, 2023, to the Ciudad Escolar-San Fernando educational complex, the problem was immediately communicated to the regional administration. “I don’t like that this complaint letter goes through the AET, it’s not logical,” wrote the director of the educational complex in an email sent to the Ministry of Education, according to documentation accessed by EL PAÍS. The countdown had just begun for the outbreak of the FP case. This case investigates the alleged commission of a crime of administrative prevarication linked to the supposed splitting of contracts to circumvent the law; avoiding putting the million-euro renovations of a dozen educational centers out to tender; and being able to handpick the company that would carry them out. The fuse lit by that request exploded nine months later, in September 2023, when Gabriel Navarro, from the Virelec group, sent two burofaxes to the Community claiming payment of 1.4 million for the works.
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January 9, 2023. The following information request arrives at the Ciudad Escolar-San Fernando educational complex. “Being aware of the existence of renovation works during 2022 (…) the following documentation is requested,” reads the document, which asks, among other things, for the “invoices received from the contractor” and “payment methods.” The letter is signed by the regional deputy inspector, which triggers immediate concern at the center.
What is happening? To find out, the director of the educational complex recounts in an email addressed to an Education official that he called an acquaintance at the Treasury (“one has friends everywhere”) and that the only thing he could tell him was that “it seems to be a complaint made in July about the work at House 5.”
No one knows who the complainant is, nor their motives. What is certain is that nine months later, in September 2023, two Vocational Training educational centers in the Community of Madrid, the IES Hotel Escuela and Ciudad Escolar, receive letters from the company Virelec demanding 1.4 million euros for unpaid amounts for works.
The Directorate General of Infrastructures claims to know nothing about them, despite their scale. And all alarms go off, even though some administration officials had known about the Treasury’s request months earlier. Thus, the regional government requests an audit report from the General Intervention, which ends up detecting “provisionally” up to 3.9 million in payments only to this company. The Community of Madrid denounces in April 2024 the former regional deputy director of Vocational Training, Alfonso Mateos, and the two directors of educational centers to whom the construction company claimed outstanding payments. That decision, the left-wing opposition believes, is inseparable from Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the regional president, deciding to dismiss her Minister of Education, Emilio Viciana, in February 2026.
“It had nothing to do with Los Pocholos,” a socialist source opines about the group of friends formed in a theater group who managed to gain positions in the administration and the regional Parliament, only to abandon them en masse with Viciana’s departure. “They get rid of him because he doesn’t look the other way.”
From that moment on, a judicial free-for-all begins. While the current president of the Assembly, Enrique Ossorio, and the current Minister of Economy, Rocío Albert, watch the case’s progress with concern, as they were the top Education officials during the investigated period, the successive months of testimonies have been spent with witnesses defending that they had no authority to decide anything. In summary: no one knew anything. Until October 2025.
“In the meeting I say very clearly that (the work) must comply with the contracts law and that it must be done by the Directorate of Infrastructures,” says José María Serrano, former deputy director general of secondary education centers of the regional government, when testifying. The executive refers to a meeting he claims to have had in 2021 with his superior, the director general of Secondary Education and Vocational Training, José María Rodríguez Jiménez, investigated in the case; the deputy director of Vocational Training, Alfonso Mateos, also investigated in the case; and one of the center directors.
“It was perfectly clear that it was going to be done through the directors (of the educational centers), with them paying the invoices,” Serrano asserts in his testimony referring to the alleged illegal splitting of contracts. “The size of the work didn’t add up,” he emphasizes. And he concludes: “I was sure something strange was going to happen there and I say clearly that the Directorate of Infrastructures and the Government Council must intervene. For works of this size, it couldn’t be done any other way.”
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As support for that statement without documentary backing in the case, there is an email from Serrano sent on December 15, 2021, in which he demands applying “as it cannot be otherwise” the public sector contracts law in one of the investigated works. That is, that a public tender be held. “In any other case, the execution of the works cannot proceed, thus expressing my total opposition to their execution,” he stated.
Irregular conduct
The recipients of the email were two of the three people who accompanied him, according to his version, in the mentioned meeting: the then deputy director of Vocational Training, and the director general of Secondary, Vocational Training and Special Regime.
During its investigation, carried out throughout 2024, the Prosecutor’s Office already saw “clearly irregular and allegedly criminal administrative conduct” in the “gross and blatant omission of the procedure” applied by the regional government.
The judge, for her part, already warned in November 2024 of “the possible existence of a criminal offense [administrative prevarication].”
Finally, the audits sent to the court by the administration itself, at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office, coincide in pointing out the responsibility of the Ministry of Education, then led by Enrique Ossorio, Díaz Ayuso’s strongman in government until 2023, and now president of the Assembly of Madrid.
“Expenses processed as minor contracts exceeding the amount of the minor contract have been detected,” they read. “Likewise, splitting of the contract object has been observed (…) in order not to exceed the limits established for the minor contract (…) and to evade the applicable tendering procedure,” they add. “Considering the object and amount of these expenses, the processing of a contracting file by the competent body of the ministry would have been appropriate,” it is specified.
Alleged irregularities that caught the attention of the Treasury, which also investigated the works of the Instituto Príncipe Felipe, as eldiario.es revealed.
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