The Civil Guard arrested on Tuesday night in Alicante Koldo García Izaguirre, who was an advisor to former minister José Luis Ábalos, at the head of the Transport portfolio, for a case of alleged corruption in the purchase of masks during the pandemic of covid, in an investigation led by the Anticorruption Prosecutor and the judge of the National Court Ismael Moreno.
As a result of the operation, the PP asked the President of the Central Government to explain whether the termination of Ábalos in 2021 was linked to these fraudulent activities of his former adviser, an extreme that Pedro Sánchez himself flatly rejected. Responding to a specific question about this in Rabat, at the end of his visit to Morocco, the head of the Executive pointed out that “that would mean that I would know”.
In addition to Ábalos’ former adviser, among those arrested is also Víctor de Aldama, president of the C.F. Zamora and that according to the investigators he would have done business with Koldo García. According to sources in the investigation, the origin of the cause is a complaint, submitted more than two years ago.
In the complaint, which was later used for Anticorruption to file a complaint, some contracts were collected by the Ministries of the Interior and Development and of several autonomous communities during the pandemic for the acquisition of health equipment.
The investigation points to a disbursement of 53 million euros in contracts that did not pass the filters because they were granted urgently. Since then, investigators have pulled the thread until they have detected the participation of García Izaguirre in the granting of irregular awards and his subsequent money laundering with the money received.
These same sources explain that Ábalos’ ex-advisor would have fixed Adif contracts at the time he was a director of the public company. According to information from Anticorruption, twenty people were arrested in the operation and 26 searches were carried out for the crimes of criminal organization, influence peddling and bribery, related to the awarding of different contracts from various administrations.
