The explanations given by Francina Armengol in her appearance are not sufficient for the PP, which has once again demanded her resignation as president of Congress, because, the opposition alleges, the alleged crimes being investigated by the European Prosecutor’s Office (embezzlement, prevarication and trafficking of influences) as a result of the case opened in the National Court are “incompatible” with the exercise of its functions as a third authority of the State.
“It is not a personal issue, it is due to the decorum of the Chamber, in which national sovereignty resides,” argued the PP spokesperson in Congress, Miguel Tellado, shortly after the press conference in which Armengol came out. at the passing of the information about the Koldo case, which the popular leader has revealed showing a series of newspaper headlines that coincide in casting suspicion on her management as president of the Balearic Government, which bought a batch of masks from the company of the corrupt plot now uncovered in the hardest part of the pandemic.
“He paid”, “he lied”, “he endorsed”, “he hid”… are some of the verbs referring to Armengol that appear on the covers that Tellado has shown from the lectern in the press room, so, in his opinion, understand, the president of Congress is increasingly “cornered” and should not continue to “stain” an institution that she would not have presided over had it not been for the fact that the president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, “rewarded her silence” with the capacity as deputy.
The key question that, in the opinion of the PP, has been left unanswered in Armengol’s “complacent” statements, is whether he received a call from the Ministry of Transportation, in which one of the members of the plot, Koldo García, who was advisor to the then head of the portfolio, José Luis Ábalos, so that his Government would buy masks from the company now investigated for the illegal collection of commissions, Management Solutions.
“Who called her: Koldo, Ábalos, the super boss?” Tellado has asked twice rhetorically, alluding to the nickname that the members of the plot reserved for a person of “very high hierarchical level” whose name they did not pronounce. And, in this sense, he recalled that other regional governments, also in socialist hands, refused to contract with the plot company. Hence, for the popular spokesperson, political responsibility, whether Armengol was a “victim” or “participant” in the scam, is as evident as in the case of Ábalos, whom the PSOE did demand to renounce his record as a deputy.
Regarding the explanation given by the president of Congress about the administration’s slowness in requesting a refund of the money for the masks, which did not meet the characteristics offered, Tellado has dismissed it as an “excuse” with which Armengol seeks to “hide” himself behind the officials and has ironically recalled that the Balearic Government “needed only seven days to pay and took 799 to claim.”
And regarding the analogies of the Koldo case with that of the purchase of masks by the Madrid City Council from another business network, which was also judicially investigated, Tellado has “radically” rejected them and has attributed them to the “insistence” of the PSOE, because that file is already archived with “two final rulings” and the City Council, in his opinion, “acted diligently in defense of the interests of the citizens” of the capital.
