José Luis Ábalos has presented his defense as if he were facing a murder charge: no body, no crime. Where is all the money he is accused of hiding? It has not appeared and as he defended before the prosecutor, they can “pawn” but they will not find it for a very simple reason. According to the former minister, it will not surface because it does not exist.
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The main accused in the trial for the ‘mask case’ being held at the Supreme Court has shown this Monday that as the investigation and trial have progressed, more money received from rigging has been imputed to him. The last figure was given by the commission agent and accused Víctor de Aldama, who spoke of between three and a half and four million euros.
In his interrogation by the chief Anti-Corruption prosecutor, Alejandro Luzón, Ábalos has said he is “delighted” with these figures, because the higher they are, the more they must prove where such a fortune is. And in his opinion, the only thing there is is a record from the Central Operative Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard that records 94,000 euros of expenses on behalf of the former minister and that have not come out of his accounts, so he infers that they have been paid in cash with money from corruption. Ábalos warned the prosecutor that the investigators have not taken into account, for example, what was contributed by his then wife, Carolina Perles, a police officer by profession, who also contributed to the family economy.
“Is this what they have found from me? This is the great mask corruption case. They can pawn it but they will not find it,” he insisted.
The agents consider that Ábalos moved a lot of cash and as proof is that he has practically no expenses in his account. The former socialist leader maintains that it has not been taken into account that at that time he lived in the Ministry’s house, expenses were charged to the public treasury, meals were paid by the Ministry or were invitations, and the car was official.
“Why do you think I lasted so long as a deputy?”
”Why do you think I lasted so long as a deputy?” he asked rhetorically to the prosecutor. “They have left me in jail without any income,” he told Luzón, to whom he clarified that they have even left him without compensation.
The former minister stated that since he has been in jail his son has had to help him financially, when this case has also affected his work. “My son had to go to a television program that he would have been disgusted to go to at another time,” he indicated. And he added: “If I had money, the money surfaces as it has surfaced for others.”
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The first half of the prosecutor’s interrogation, which lasted a total of four hours, revolved around the alleged payments from the scheme to Ábalos in exchange for mask contracts, aid in other institutions, and other jobs such as help with the Air Europa loan, at Aldama’s request, all of which were denied by the accused.
The second part focused on how the UCO has been linking Ábalos’s handling of large amounts of cash. Ábalos described the reports as “lacking rigor” and “permanent bias” and explained that the entire investigation has been subjected to the “diabolical test” of having to prove mere hypotheses himself, such as the one about the “reams.”
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“The reams were reams, not money, and the boxes of reams were boxes of reams, not boxes of money,” he emphasized. He explained that he requested boxes of reams from the Ministry because he is from the paper generation and preferred to see reports on paper, which is why he consumed a lot of paper, which he requested from Koldo García and was brought by his driver or bodyguards.
Neither reams nor sausages
In a UCO report, the agents maintain that the words “chistorras,” “soles,” and “lechugas” were code words used by former advisor Koldo García and his wife to refer to the cash bills they handled, while the former minister spoke of reams or boxes of reams, which is “another indication of the interest in hiding the existence of that cash.”
The Anti-Corruption prosecutor insisted heavily on Ábalos’s relationship with Jéssica Rodríguez, to whom the scheme allegedly paid a rental apartment for two years and the then minister had placed her in Ineco, a public company dependent on Transport.
Ábalos’s explanations in this part of the interrogation were more confusing. He denied that he intermediated to get Rodríguez a job, with whom he had an “extramarital” relationship, although immediately after he acknowledged having given his advisor Koldo García her resume to help her.
He also denied that Aldama paid for the apartment in Plaza de España so that the young woman would stop sharing an apartment, later recognizing that it was García who took care of that apartment and that a friend of his, Alberto Escolano, paid for it, about whom he did not know that he was Aldama’s partner. He also did not know that his driver, Rubén de Aldama, was the brother of Víctor de Aldama, the commission agent.
Moreover, he asserts that everything stated by Aldama and Rodríguez is false. He does not understand why both have said in court that they do not know each other when, according to Ábalos, he met Rodríguez through the businessman. The former minister defended his romantic relationship with Jéssica Rodríguez and maintained that the only reason the young woman said she was not going to work at Ineco or that she did not know Víctor de Aldama is because she is coerced. “She is a person I loved and I know. She would not say that if she had not been coerced. They must have told her that nothing will happen to her. I am convinced,” the former minister assured.
And otherwise, he denies all accusations. He defends that the mask contracts during the pandemic were correct, denies knowing that Aldama was behind Soluciones de Gestión: denies that in exchange for those contracts the businessman paid for the rental of a chalet in La Alcaidesa (Cádiz), nor Rodríguez’s apartment; and denies having any involvement in the Air Europa loan that caused Aldama to pay for a vacation in Marbella.
