The defenses of José Luis Ábalos and Koldo García requested that a confrontation between the former ministerial advisor and Víctor de Aldama be held at the trial taking place in the Supreme Court, but the court rejected it. In the absence of a face-to-face meeting between the two defendants, who have been openly opposed since the businessman decided to self-incriminate to obtain judicial benefits, the ninth session of the trial this Thursday hosted a double confrontation between official experts and experts hired by the defenses to analyze the audits of the investigated mask contracts and the audios found at Koldo García’s home that support part of the investigation. What was initially presented as a technical and anodyne day with the risk of yawns spreading, has turned into the most contentious and agitated session of the trial so far.
Expert reports often lead to tense situations because it is common for one of the parties, the one harmed by the report in question, to question the conclusions of the experts, who are usually accredited experts in their field not always accustomed to criticism. In those that focused on Thursday’s trial session, this starting situation was expected: the defenses of Ábalos and Koldo García were going to try to discredit the official expert report and the accusations, the counter-reports commissioned by the lawyers. This is what happened during the almost three hours that the first test of the day lasted, focused on the audit carried out by the Ministry of Transport, already under the mandate of Óscar Puente, on the mask contracts awarded to Soluciones de Gestión, the company linked to Aldama.
To explain this report, the four inspectors who prepared it appeared. But alongside them sat a fifth expert, the author of a report commissioned by the defenses of the former minister and his former advisor, who questioned the official one. As expected, the head of Anticorruption, Alejandro Luzón, and the lawyer for the popular prosecution, Alberto Durán, allowed the former to present their main conclusions, such as that Soluciones de Gestión had its offer made before the ministerial order to buy masks was published or the “striking” intervention of Koldo García in the processing of the contracts. “It is evident at all times. Mainly, bringing the offer of this company to the table. It is striking that he is an advisor and that there was a chief of staff above any of the advisors, including him, but he does not appear much throughout the process,” described one of the experts.
The authors of the Transport report also warned that, after analyzing 128 files, more than 6,000 emails and 200 folders, they have not found any written or verbal trace explaining why the mask order was doubled, from four to eight million, in just over half an hour. The experts insisted that the “technical decision” adopted on March 20, 2020, was to buy four million because it was the amount estimated as necessary for 15 days, the period for which the first state of alarm of the covid-19 pandemic was decreed. “It is changed to eight million, but there is no technical decision for 8 million. In all the analyzed documentation, no one states that it goes from 15 days to 30. I have not found it,” insisted the author of that part of the report in the face of reproaches from Ábalos’s lawyer, who questioned this conclusion and the path followed by the experts to reach it.
The arguments of the defenses of the former minister and his former advisor found some oxygen in the intervention of the author of the counter-expert report, for whom the Transport report suffers from a lack of transparency (because it does not include some of the documents on which it is based) and includes value judgments that she considers inappropriate for these documents. This expert also questioned the criteria followed by her colleagues to choose the people they interviewed for their study. The inspectors explained that they only have competence to carry out internal audits with interviews with Transport personnel, so they could not speak with Ábalos, Koldo García, or other people who intervened in the contracts being judged. The former minister’s lawyer warned that a former senior official of that ministry who is now in the Treasury was interviewed, which the authors justified by saying that since he continues to work in the central administration, he was contacted and agreed to participate.
Tensions between the prosecution, the defenses, and the experts who analyzed the mask purchases had already raised the tone of the session above the usual. But the worst was yet to come. For the afternoon session, the court had planned the same format of expert and counter-expert reports, but focused on the audios intercepted from Koldo García. These audios were the basis of the report by the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard that led to the indictment of the former PSOE Organization Secretary Santos Cerdán, and they support a large part of the investigation into the rigging of public works. But this part of the Koldo case is being investigated in the Audiencia Nacional and is not part of the Supreme Court trial. However, Koldo García’s defense requested that the authors of a counter-report commissioned by Cerdán’s defense, which questioned the authenticity of these audios, testify, which led the Prosecutor’s Office to demand that the agents who examined the files and concluded that they had not been manipulated also testify.
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The discussion between the prosecution and the defense exploded when, at the beginning of the interrogation, Luzón asked the agents if they harbored any doubt about the authenticity of the audios, and the former advisor’s lawyer interrupted the prosecutor to protest, considering that questions about the audios could not be asked because they are not being judged in this case. “But they asked for it,” exclaimed Durán, the lawyer for the popular prosecution.
The lawyer argued that she had only called the experts hired by Cerdán’s defense to ask them if they believed the chain of custody of the audios had been respected, but that she opposed examining the authenticity of the files. Faced with the lawyer’s insistence, the president of the court, Andrés Martínez Arrieta, asked the public prosecutor if he considered it appropriate to “limit” the evidence to the chain of custody. “The public prosecutor understands nothing,” admitted Luzón, who considered that the experts cited this Thursday could not contribute anything on that matter because they did not intervene in the searches and cloning of Koldo García’s devices.
The confusion generated forced the court to withdraw to deliberate, although the agreed solution did not convince any of the parties, and the prosecutor resumed the interrogation where he had left off an hour earlier. And each expert came to confirm the conclusions of their reports. The agents of the Criminalistics Service assured that if the audios had been manipulated, there would be some trace of it. “The audios are completely intact and there has been no manipulation of any kind,” assured one of the experts, who also do not consider it possible that they have been fabricated with artificial intelligence or that, as the defense claims, files could have been “injected” remotely into the original clone after the intervention of the devices at the ministerial advisor’s home.
For the experts hired by the defense of the former Organization Secretary, the main problem with the official report is that it was not made from the original device, but from a copy extracted by the Supreme Court from the dump made by the UCO. “One thing is the dump in court and another thing is how the evidence from that device got there. And for that, we need to access the original device. In our opinion, it is not about discussing the dump or that the Civil Guard has carried out an abnormal action, what we cannot prove is how those audios got to that device,” defended the expert.
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