The PSOE has requested the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court, which last week left the mask case pending judgment and for which José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García remain in prison, to grant the necessary license to file a complaint against Víctor de Aldama, whom it accuses of the crimes of slander and libel against the main party of the Government. The middleman focused his statement as an investigated party in the trial on pointing without evidence to the President of the Government as being in the “top rank” of the hierarchy of the corruption network that nested in the Ministry of Transport and which, supposedly, profited illegally by taking advantage of the pandemic.
The legal services of Ferraz consider that “the falsehoods stated” by the businessman and alleged head of the network, who has been identified as the “corrupting link” and for whom the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office requests the lowest sentence in the mask trial due to his cooperation with justice: seven years in prison compared to 24 years for the former Minister of Development and former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE and 19 and a half years for his trusted advisor and man for everything, have become evident.
“If there is a hierarchy, and I am obviously in the organized, criminal gang, Mr. President of the Government Pedro Sánchez is in the top rank; Mr. Ábalos is second, because he was the one who gave and granted; Mr. Koldo García, third, and I, fourth,” Aldama stated in his declaration at the Supreme Court, an accusation that the head of Anti-Corruption, Alejandro Luzón, dismissed in his final report. “Certainly, the President of the Government was not number one, as Víctor de Aldama quite freely attributes that role to him,” Luzón said. Aldama also claimed that Ábalos and Koldo García received between 3.5 and 4 million euros in kickbacks between 2019 and 2022 for rigging the awarding of public works and that both told him that part was intended for the illegal financing of the PSOE and that Sánchez was aware of it.
The socialists already requested the Supreme Court’s license to file a complaint against Aldama in January 2025, after the businessman launched a series of accusations against party and Government officials in one of his statements in the high court. But the case judge, Leopoldo Puente, rejected the request because the facts had not been judged and, therefore, it was not possible to know if the businessman’s statements were false.
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In view of Aldama’s statement as an accused during the trial, the socialists announced that they would again request the Supreme Court’s approval to act against the businessman’s “slanders.” “We will not allow ourselves to be defamed,” they warned. In their document, dated this Thursday, the party states that “far from rectifying his falsehoods, slanderous and libelous, against this Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, and some of its representatives, he ratified and amplified them, making very serious accusations, which even if made in his right of defense, are absolutely reprehensible in the strongest way, through the corresponding complaint for crimes of slander and libel, in defense of our honor, when, moreover, all this has been stated without providing a single piece of evidence to support them before that Court, other than his testimony, after more than a year and a half since he started his defamatory campaign,” the PSOE objects in its document.
The party maintains that these and other statements “have seriously attacked the honor of important members of the Government and the party, as well as directly of the PSOE, being clearly harmed.” The PSOE emphasizes that the statements Aldama has been making both in the investigation phase and in the trial “are absolutely false; something that, in a way, the investigated party himself seems to have acknowledged in his own statements indicating that he lacks any proof of it, and therefore, without any validity in his defense within the said procedure, and therefore, responding to other spurious interests and outside the procedure.”
In the order issued by Judge Puente in January 2025 to oppose the first complaint, the judge stated that it could not be filed until the trial was held and “in view of its result,” implying that one would have to wait for the sentence, which is expected before summer. Legal sources also warn that the illegal financing that Aldama attributed to the PSOE has not been judged in the Supreme Court, but is being investigated in a case that remains secret in the National Court. The response to the PSOE’s request will not be given this time by Judge Puente, but by the seven-judge panel that tried the former Minister of Transport, his former advisor, and the middleman.
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