When Samson had his hair cut, he lost his superhuman strength. Koldo García had his 27 mobile phones taken away by the police and has lost his memory. “I don’t remember,” has been the main response from the former advisor to José Luis Ábalos during the interrogation conducted by the prosecutor this morning. García, former minister Ábalos, and the commission agent Víctor de Aldama are being tried before the Supreme Court for alleged crimes of belonging to a criminal organization, influence peddling, bribery, use of privileged information, and embezzlement.
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The little that Koldo has remembered is that he did not accept the payments and gifts that Aldama supposedly gave him. The commission agent explained during his statement yesterday that he gave 10,000 euros a month to Koldo to share with Ábalos. He added that sometimes he did not have cash in Spain and then the delivery was made in the Dominican Republic and it was Joseba, Koldo’s brother, who collected it. He also added that he gave Koldo a car and a motorcycle and also paid for the fertility treatment of Koldo’s then partner, Patricia Úriz.
Other witnesses have confirmed Aldama’s statements, but Koldo has denied everything. He has assured that those payments never existed. He has acknowledged that his brother traveled to the Dominican Republic, but he did so to “look for a girlfriend.” “Joseba is very adventurous, he met a girl, took a plane, and left. Aldama, who found out my brother was there, asked me the favor to collect some documents,” he said. There was a second trip and Joseba collected a new delivery: “My brother took the envelope and I am sure he did not touch it. That second time he already came with a partner.”
The former advisor to Ábalos has also denied the alleged gifts both for himself and for the minister. He recalled that “I needed a car” and that he mentioned it to Aldama, but he concluded: “I paid for it myself.” He also acknowledged that the commission agent paid for his partner’s fertility treatment, but he stated that “I returned the money.”
During the trial, it has been attempted to prove that the network made arrangements for the rescue of the airline Air Europa during the pandemic. The Prosecutor’s Office suspects that Javier Hidalgo, CEO of the airline, paid in exchange for a house in Marbella for Ábalos’s summer vacations and that Aldama was in charge of the arrangements to rent it. Koldo has acknowledged that he sent some photos of that house, Villa Parra, to Aldama for him to see, but “nothing more.”
The rental with an option to buy for Ábalos of another house in the town of La Alcaidesa in Cádiz has also been addressed in exchange for his efforts so that the company Villafuel obtained a license to operate in the hydrocarbons market. Koldo has acknowledged that he helped his boss find that accommodation and again “nothing more.”
The bulk of the alleged illicit activities of the network focuses on the purchase of 13 million masks during the pandemic from the company Soluciones de Gestión in exchange for commissions. From the statements that various witnesses have detailed throughout the trial, it appears that the two mask purchase contracts, for eight and five million units respectively, were awarded by direct appointment.
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Koldo has stated that he “did not know” the executives of Soluciones de Gestión and that there were more offers. And he emphasized that all he had were good intentions: “Masks were needed and if they had offered me 20 million, I would have bought them,” he assured after also not remembering if it was Aldama who told him about Soluciones de Gestión.
Koldo does remember Jéssica Rodríguez, Ábalos’s ex-girlfriend, and Claudia Montes, former Miss Asturias. The prosecution maintains that both women were placed in public companies and that they were not going to work. The network is also accused of having paid the rent for Jéssica’s luxury apartment in Plaza de España, Madrid. Koldo has acknowledged some things, but only partially.
He recounted that “Jéssica and Ábalos started a personal relationship and were looking for an apartment” and acknowledged that he knew it was a partner of Aldama who paid the rent. He also recalled that he sent Jéssica’s resume to the president of Adif, Isabel Pardo de Vera, and that he accompanied the girl to an interview to get her hired at Ineco, but he assured that he did not know that Jéssica was not going to work: “I thought she was teleworking.” Regarding the girl’s subsequent employment at Tragsatec, Koldo said he was unaware that Jéssica was employed there.
Jéssica did not come out very well from Koldo’s statement. The network continued paying for her apartment even after she broke up with Ábalos. Koldo himself dipped into his savings to pay a monthly rent, as he explained. The fact is that she, according to Koldo, was subjecting the former minister to a kind of blackmail: “Jéssica pressured Ábalos to pay for the apartment and other things or otherwise the public would learn about certain things, not criminal, but personal,” he recounted.
In any case, Koldo has presented himself as a man who “likes to help others.” He also spoke of Ábalos “as a good person.” So when someone asked them for something, they tried to cooperate. The former advisor recalled that in “some public companies there were vacant administrative positions because the salaries were very low.”
That is why he did not see it badly to lend a hand to Carmen Montes, former Miss Asturias, a woman whom “Ábalos met at a rally, who was a single mother, had no job, and was struggling.” Koldo sent Montes’s resume to the president of Renfe, but his involvement in the matter, as he explained, was limited to “cutting out the photo of Claudia that was not suitable for a resume” and defending her “when she was a victim of harassment, because I always defend women.”
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