The collateral damage of the alleged corruption in the purchase of masks during the pandemic that affects the PSOE
affects the delicate balance that Pedro Sánchez's coalition government maintains in Parliament
, where achieving approval of each of its proposals is becoming a trial by fire.
Because after having tried to force the resignation of deputy José Luis Abalos - former party organization secretary and former head of the Ministry of Transportation - to leave his seat, the
former minister's refusal complicates the government.
The ministry headed by Abalos would have carried out the hiring from whose irregular commissions
his closest advisor
, Koldo García Izaguirre, would have benefited.
This Tuesday at noon the 24-hour period that the socialists had given Abalos to resign was met.
“We are not judges, nor prosecutors, nor do we judge, but
we believe that there is a political responsibility
and we hope that the delivery of the minutes (of the deputy) will occur in the next 24 hours,” the PSOE Executive spokesperson, Esther, had said on Monday. Grief.
But Abalos not only did not resign his seat in Congress.
He called a press conference this Tuesday where he announced that he will remain as a deputy - since the seat is his and not the political party he represents - and that
he will move alone to the mixed group
, which is the one made up of the parties that cannot count with a representation of 15 deputies.
Today the mixed group is made up of the five seats of Podemos, that of the Galician Nationalist Bloc, that of the Navarro People's Union and that of the Canarian Coalition.
"I'm innocent"
“I cannot end my political career or my career as a corrupt person
when I am innocent
,” Abalos said this Tuesday.
“If I resign it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness,” he clarified.
For now, there are no charges against him.
“Given the need to defend myself and restore my honor as a deputy and as a person and given the need not to compromise the socialist parliamentary group, I have decided to move to the mixed group of the Congress of Deputies from where I will continue defending the ideas that founded the beginning of my political activism,” Abalos said.
One less deputy
His departure from the ranks of the PSOE reduces the socialist presence in Congress.
As of this Tuesday, Pedro Sánchez's party
has 120 of its own deputies.
It might seem like a minimal setback in the bloc of 179 deputies from eight parties that gave him the absolute majority to be re-elected in November of last year.
The acting president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.
Photo EFE
But if you look a little closer, Sánchez
achieved his third investiture in exchange for agreeing with parties as dissimilar
as the Catalan and Basque independentists, both from the right and the left, who do not make governability easy for him.
Furthermore, Podemos's farewell to the coalition of left-wing parties -Sumar- that the current Minister of Labor Yolanda Díaz created in 2022 reduced its parliamentary group: of the 31 Sumar seats obtained in the general elections of July last year,
today It has 26.
The lawyer who reported
Clarín
contacted the lawyer Ramiro Grau, who was the one who made the first complaint about the corrupt plot
that was behind the contracts to buy masks from China
and from whose commissions the right-hand man of former Minister Abalos, Koldo García Izaguirre, would have benefited.
He was an advisor to the former minister and on February 20 he was arrested in Alicante by the Civil Guard.
And although he was released two days later, he is being investigated for allegedly having charged
illegal commissions in the purchase of medical supplies
for the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Transport and for the island autonomous communities, those of the Balearic Islands and the Canary Islands.
García Izaguirre was a security guard and driver.
In addition to being his advisor, Abalos appointed him as a director of Renfe Mercancías, the Spanish public train company.
In two years, his assets increased by 1.5 million euros.
“Since 2020 I have been denouncing it,” Grau tells
Clarín
, who discovered that a company in Zaragoza, the city where he lives, “that had no activity and that in 2019 had invoiced zero euros, had become the exclusive supplier of the Ministry of Transportation.
But no one listened to his complaint.
“Abalos was the second in the party, he was a minister and no one dared to mess with him
,” Grau justifies that his complaint came to nothing.
Ten letters to Pedro Sánchez
The lawyer clarifies that he sent ten letters addressed directly to the president of the government.
He never received a response.
“Now Abalos is a simple deputy and has lost a lot of strength or ability to pressure and influence,” Grau believes.
"And I also want to think that the Special Prosecutor's Office against corruption and organized crime, which is the one handling the matter, is a body that does its job well," he assures.
Ultimately, they are the ones who have listened to me.”
“Paying tribute to the right, as I believe the political leadership of my party does, is not going to prevent the right from continuing its hunt beyond me,” said Abalos when he confessed that he did not plan to give up his seat.
The Popular Party has already announced that
it will file a complaint against the PSOE to the European Prosecutor's Office
, the European Anti-Fraud Office and the European Commission.
The corruption case being investigated continues to be a thorn in the side of Pedro Sánchez, who set foot in La Moncloa for the first time in June 2018 when he evicted Mariano Rajoy, precisely,
with a motion of censure for corruption within the Popular Party. .
“We are a government that was born from the need to end the corruption of the previous administration, and that has made exemplarity its flag,” Sánchez said over the weekend, during the meeting in Madrid of the Socialist International that he also presides over.
“
The fight against corruption must be relentless
,” he added before socialist representatives from hundreds of countries.
Wherever it comes from and whoever falls falls.”
P.B.