A corruption trial of a former right-hand man to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is to begin tomorrow, a politically explosive case that has threatened to topple the minority government led by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party.
Jose Luis Abalos is a disgraced ex-Socialist heavyweight, a former transportation minister who helped propel Sanchez to power in 2018. The case is one of several corruption affairs rattling the fragile coalition.
Abalos and his former adviser, Koldo Garcia, are suspected of pocketing kickbacks for handing out public contracts worth millions of euros for sanitary equipment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Photo: AFP
The Supreme Court in Madrid is to judge them for alleged bribery, embezzlement, influence peddling, membership of a criminal organization and misuse of confidential information. The men deny the charges.
Prosecutors want Abalos to serve 24 years in jail. They portray him as the mastermind of a scheme of illicit enrichment. They have called for a 19-year term for Garcia, who they say was a key intermediary.
They argued in court that the men had abused their government positions and contacts to favor the interests of businessman Victor de Aldama, who has already admitted his role in the vast and complex affair.
Abalos has consistently protested that the investigation has been unfair.
“I feel like I am living in a fiction,” he told the daily El Mundo in November last year, shortly before his arrest. “I cannot believe the prosecutor’s office is asking for 24 years in jail for me.”
Garcia also protested in comments to an investigatory committee of the Navarre regional parliament.
“I am in jail without proof that I’ve committed any crime,” he said, speaking by video link from his place of pretrial detention.
More than 75 witnesses and about 20 experts are to testify during the proceedings, which are due to run through this month.
The investigation also appears to have ensnared Abalos’ successor in the powerful post of Socialist organization secretary, Santos Cerdan.
Caught up in another case of suspected corruption for public works contracts, he has been forced to step down from what is a key position in the party.
The fall from grace of Abalos and Cerdan — two of Sanchez’s closest allies — has embarrassed a leader who took power promising to clean up Spanish politics.
He took over from the main conservative Popular Party (PP) after it had been engulfed in its own graft scandal.
Separate corruption investigations into Sanchez’s wife, Begona Gomez, and his brother David Sanchez, who faces trial later this year, have piled further pressure on the government, one of few leftist administrations in Europe.
The PP and far-right opposition party Vox have called for Pedro Sanchez’s resignation and early elections. They said that the scandals expose systemic Socialist corruption that reaches the prime minister himself.
Pedro Sanchez has always denied any illegal funding of the Socialists and rebuffed calls for polls before the next scheduled general election, due next year.
PHISHING: The con might appear convincing, as the scam e-mails can coincide with genuine messages from Apple saying you have run out of storage For a while you have been getting messages from Apple saying “your iCloud storage is full.” They say you have exceeded your storage plan, so documents are no longer being backed up, and photos you take are not being uploaded. You have been resisting Apple’s efforts to get you to pay a minimum of ￡0.99 (US$1.33) a month for more storage, but it seems that you cannot keep putting off the inevitable: You have received an e-mail which says your iCloud account has been blocked, and your photos and videos would be deleted very soon. To keep them you need
The Israeli military has demolished entire villages as part of its invasion of south Lebanon, rigging homes with explosives and razing them to the ground in massive remote detonations. The Guardian reviewed three videos posted by the Israeli military and on social media, which showed Israel carrying out mass detonations in the villages of Taybeh, Naqoura and Deir Seryan along the Israel-Lebanon border. Lebanese media has reported more mass detonations in other border villages, but satellite imagery was not readily available to verify these claims. The demolitions came after Israeli Minister of Defense Israel Katz called for the destruction of
A US YouTuber who caused outrage for filming himself kissing a statue commemorating Korean wartime sex slaves has been sentenced to six months in prison, a court in Seoul said yesterday. Johnny Somali, 25, gained notoriety several years ago for recording himself doing a series of provocative stunts in South Korea and Japan, and streaming them on platforms such as YouTube and Twitch. South Korean authorities indicted Somali — whose real name is Ramsey Khalid Ismael — in 2024 on public order violations and obstruction of business, and banned him from leaving the country. “The court has sentenced him to six months in
The death toll from a shooting in western Afghanistan rose to 11 on Saturday, after gunmen targeted civilians at a picnic spot in Herat, the provincial authority said. Bullet marks were visible on a wall of the Sayed Mohammad Agha Shia shrine, while bloodstains marked a blanket abandoned at the scene. “Eleven people have been recorded dead and eight others wounded from Friday’s incident, with the condition of two of the wounded reported as critical,” Herat’s information office said in a statement. The update raises a toll of seven killed provided on Friday by the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs
RSS