Aldama’s catalog of accusations to implicate Pedro Sánchez

There were many hours of testimony, seven and a half. The broker Víctor de Aldama was interrogated before the Supreme Court throughout the entire day yesterday. He admitted to some of his illicit businesses. He claimed to have paid commissions and gifts to former minister José Luis Ábalos and his advisor Koldo García. And he also tried to implicate the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, in the shady dealings of the network.

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The relationship between Aldama and Sánchez was very brief, always according to the businessman’s version. The broker recounted that he had only seen the president on two occasions. The first took place in February 2019. By then, Aldama had already befriended Koldo and Ábalos. According to his account, one day “Koldo told me there was going to be a rally in Madrid with the ministers and the president and that I had to go.”

The broker—now accused of crimes of belonging to a criminal organization, bribery, influence peddling, insider trading, and embezzlement—did not like the idea much. “I told Koldo that I wasn’t into those kinds of events, that I wasn’t from the PSOE and didn’t feel like sitting through a three-hour rally by a man I wasn’t interested in at all.” But the advisor didn’t listen to his complaints: “It’s an opportunity, everyone will be there and the boss [referring to Ábalos] has already spoken to the president about you,” Koldo replied, always according to his account.

Aldama did not regret following Koldo’s advice. He went to the rally and, according to him, they rolled out the red carpet: “They seated me in the third row and, after the event, they took me to a private area to talk with Pedro Sánchez.” There the president—Aldama says—spoke to him very confidently: “Thank you very much for everything, I know perfectly well what you are doing and I just want to thank you.” The meeting was immortalized in a photograph. However, the president has always denied such a private meeting and that conversation.

That meeting was brief and even shorter was the second, a mere coincidence among the many guests at Ábalos’s 60th birthday party, organized by his then-wife, Carolina Perles. Aldama mentioned yesterday in passing that he also saw the president at that party. Nothing more. However, throughout his testimony, he tried to implicate Sánchez in the network’s activities and mentioned him several times.

Aldama claimed that Sánchez was called “the one,” “just like what happened in Venezuela with Nicolás Maduro.” “There Delcy Rodríguez was the boss and here, Ábalos was the boss,” he added. And he specified that “Pedro Sánchez was at level one. Ábalos, at two. Koldo, at three and I, at four. People knew it and when Koldo called, they answered the phone. In fact, Sánchez put Koldo in the Ministry because he couldn’t put him in Moncloa, according to what he told me,” he emphasized in his account to implicate the highest state institutions in his relationships.

Along those lines, he insisted that the relationship between Sánchez and Koldo was very close: “I realized that Koldo called the Prime Minister simply ‘Pedro’ and I remembered Koldo’s words: ‘The day the president tells me I have to call him president, I’m out. He owes me a lot and he knows why.’”

He also mentioned that on one occasion he saw the advisor call the Prime Minister and the latter answer the phone, although he did not recognize Sánchez’s voice. Koldo’s lawyer tried to refute that claim and warned that her client had 27 phones, which were seized by the Civil Guard, and none had Sánchez’s number registered nor is there any record of calls between them. In the end, Aldama had to admit that maybe Koldo deceived him.

The accused said that Ábalos tasked him in 2019 with meeting the then interim president of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, to deliver a letter, supposedly authorized by Sánchez, showing Spain’s support for Guaidó. Aldama fulfilled the task. There, “they talked about giving quotas of Venezuelan oil that Guaidó would deliver to finance the PSOE in exchange for Spanish support for his presidency.” According to Aldama, that agreement persisted with Delcy Rodríguez and the Spanish president “knew absolutely everything and was aware of all the movements.”

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In that meeting, “Guaidó asked Spain to support him. I relayed it to Ábalos and he to President Sánchez, who a few days later gave his full support to Guaidó as president of Venezuela,” Aldama recounted. And he added that “we started talking about the Socialist International; I was told that the president was obsessed with the Socialist International, that he needed funding and that it could be obtained with the businesses controlled by Guaidó as interim president.”

The broker also explained that he has evidence of these facts, but he mentioned it briefly because this evidence is contained in a secret file in another case being investigated by the National Court.

But according to Aldama, that alleged funding did not come only from Venezuela. The accused said that when he started working with them, Ábalos and Koldo told him they needed “funding” for the party. They obtained it in exchange for awarding public works contracts by direct appointment, something that would have been done with Sánchez’s knowledge, according to Aldama’s version, which the other two accused will probably try to refute today in their statements.

And as could be expected, Aldama also referred to the famous trip to Madrid in January 2020 of the then vice president of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez, current acting president of the Caribbean country, despite there being a ban on her flying to Europe.

Contrary to what the Government has always defended, the accused recounted that the Executive, including President Pedro Sánchez, knew about that trip, that everyone knew Rodríguez was coming and even that he had organized a lunch with several ministers, including Salvador Illa, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, María Jesús Montero, José Luis Ábalos, and Sánchez himself.

“What Koldo told me is that the president had given the green light for the vice president’s trip,” he assured. He had warned that there was an international sanction on Rodríguez and that if she landed in Europe she risked being arrested, but still the trip was approved: “A vice president doesn’t get on a 12-hour flight without knowing if they are going to arrest her. It seems incredible to me that it is said it wasn’t planned,” he stressed.

And he insisted that there was a lunch organized, which he paid for, and that even the CNI went to the place to check it out. However, when Rodríguez was already flying something happened. “I don’t know what kind of mistakes they made, it looked like a Torrente movie. They called me and told me to turn back, but she landed,” he added.

Aldama also tried to involve Begoña Gómez, Pedro Sánchez’s wife. He declared that shortly after meeting Koldo, the then Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, called Ábalos to inform him that Sepi was going to sell some very good land in downtown Madrid at the intersection of Velázquez and María de Molina streets. Aldama, he said before the court, made a purchase offer, knowing that there could be “good commissions” in that deal. But his expectations vanished because “Koldo told me to withdraw the offer because Begoña Gómez wanted the land for herself.”

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