That the PSOE’s cash payments would monopolize the interest of the ninth session of the trial of José Luis Ábalos, Koldo García, and Víctor de Aldama, even if they are not part of this case, was already sensed from the moment the Supreme Court summoned Mariano Moreno, former manager of the PSOE, and Celia Rodríguez, a party worker, as witnesses. What was difficult to foresee was that it would be the defense of the former ministerial advisor who would try to sow doubts about Ferraz’s financial control and the PP’s lawyer who would protest it.
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What Koldo García’s lawyer intended was to attribute the cash handled by her client to the reimbursement of PSOE expenses, but the prosecution saw it coming in advance and, before the defense asked, had managed to extract an affirmation from the former party manager that nullified that possibility. The court also heard this Wednesday from the former Secretary of State for Transport, Pedro Saura, who stated that he was annoyed that Koldo García mediated for him to attend to Aldama to discuss the rescue of Air Europa.
The former PSOE manager and worker Celia Rodríguez had already testified during the investigation phase of the Koldo case in the Supreme Court, where they were summoned after a report by the Civil Guard’s Central Operative Unit (UCO) alluded to “a lack of concordance” between the documentation sent by the PSOE to the Supreme Court regarding the settlements made to Ábalos and conversations between García and his ex-wife about alleged cash income “through envelopes at the PSOE headquarters” on Ferraz street. Moreno and Rodríguez explained that the cash that the former minister and his former advisor received from the party corresponded to expense settlements such as meals or travel, but the investigating judge considered that these testimonies had not cleared up all doubts about the formation’s cash payments and requested the National Court to investigate it. From that request, a specific case about Ferraz’s payments has derived, which remains secret and of which it is only known that it has led the party to provide all documentation on expense payments between 2017 and 2024.
That matter, therefore, is not being judged now in the Supreme Court, but the court has summoned as witnesses, at the request of the popular prosecution and the defenses of Ábalos and Koldo, the manager and the worker who handled these payments. The fact that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office had not requested these appearances and that, once they occurred, it did not raise any questions, shows that the prosecutor did not expect to get anything relevant from them. But the popular prosecutions were interested in that issue creeping into the hearing, and the defenses of the minister and his former advisor wanted to show that the accused handled a lot of legal cash. The result was a tense and extensive interrogation between García’s lawyer and the former party manager with countless interventions by the presiding judge to try to redirect the session. “We are in a loop,” lamented Andrés Martínez Arrieta.
The former manager explained, in response to questions from the PP, that the PSOE’s cash box only compensated for travel, representation, or so-called “activity” expenses, and in all three cases, these usually corresponded to meals, accommodation, transport, gasoline, or tolls. The tickets were attached along with a settlement sheet authorized by the department head, and the administration area or management (depending on the amount) gave the final approval. The manager detailed that most of the time, expense reimbursement was done in cash and that this money came from a specific party account. When money was needed in Ferraz’s cash box, the necessary amount was requested from the bank, and a security company delivered it to the socialist headquarters. “Never,” according to the former manager, were 500, 200, or 100 euro notes requested, so “it is not possible” that, as the UCO concluded, Koldo and his ex-partner collected envelopes with “chistorras” at Ferraz, as 500 euro notes were supposedly referred to in code.
The PP lawyer’s interrogation revealed some gaps in the system, such as Ábalos, as Organization Secretary, being in charge of authorizing his own expenses. But it was also a question from Durán that closed the door to the possibility the defense clung to to explain the cash handled by the accused: Is it impossible for Ábalos and Koldo to have received cash from the PSOE that was not previously justified by expenses advanced by them? “Of course,” replied the former manager.
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The answer did not please the former ministerial advisor’s lawyer, who displayed settlement sheets from Koldo García with amounts of up to more than 4,000 euros that he supposedly passed to the PSOE and which, although signed, have no date or concept to which the expense corresponds. “How do you explain this with what you said about there being no unaccounted expenses?” the lawyer inquired, which provoked the popular prosecution’s protest over the “dubious origin” of those documents. “You are taking for granted that these sheets come from the PSOE, but we don’t know that,” warned lawyer Durán, for whom it is not convenient that the control of Ferraz’s expenses be questioned in this trial, because that is precisely what the defenses intend.
The PSOE manager and worker who testified afterwards did confirm another of the explanations put forward by Koldo García’s defense to justify the cash funds that investigators have accredited he handled: the advisor often collected the money corresponding to expenses advanced by Ábalos and all that referred to the rest of the members of the Organization Secretariat. And then, supposedly, he distributed it among them. All expenses, the Ferraz secretary confirmed, were authorized by Ábalos. In response to questions from the advisor’s lawyer, Rodríguez said she could not quantify the annual amount of reimbursed expenses of the Organization Secretariat. “But could it be more than 100,000 euros?” the lawyer insisted, again provoking Arrieta’s reaction. “The witness has already said she doesn’t know.” According to the documentation sent to the Supreme Court by the PSOE during the investigation of the case, in Ábalos’s four years at the head of that department, the party paid cash settlements for his team’s expenses totaling 7,299.04 euros (2017), 33,652.08 (2018), 55,411,26 (2019), 30,795.51 (2020), and 237.83 (until July 2021).
The Secretary of State’s contacts with Aldama
In this Wednesday’s session, Pedro Saura, current president of Correos and Secretary of State for Transport during Ábalos’s tenure, also testified. Anti-Corruption points to him as the architect, in August 2020, of a press release that announced the Executive’s intention to save the airline, a document that, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, served to reassure its creditors. As soon as prosecutor Luzón asked him the first question, normally an initial contact to get into the matter, Saura launched into explaining in great detail, apparently more than necessary, how that information was conceived and the discussions that the airline’s rescue generated in the ministry.
Aside from the confusion about the note, which he clarified was not a note but a briefing document sent to several journalists, Saura revealed that Koldo García mediated on two occasions for him to attend to Aldama, who was on Air Europa’s payroll and mediated in its rescue, as the company’s former CEO Javier Hidalgo admitted in his witness statement. Saura recounted that Aldama sent him a message that he did not answer, whereupon Koldo sent him another asking him to attend to the businessman. Thus, he said, a “courtesy call of no more than two minutes” took place, in which he claims he told him that the rescue depended on SEPI, not Transport. Weeks later, Koldo García appeared at the Secretary of State’s office door with Hidalgo and another person who turned out to be Aldama. Saura assured that both movements annoyed him because he had asked Ábalos to “encapsulate” the airline’s rescue and keep everything within the Secretary of State’s office. “What Koldo does, I understand comes from Ábalos, and that’s why it bothered me,” he noted.
