The Government is trying to minimize the waves of the tsunami that means that the two former Organization secretaries, men of Pedro Sánchez’s greatest confidence, José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán, have ended up in preventive detention. The first has entered the Soto del Real prison along with his former collaborator, Koldo García, due to the risk of escape due to the imminent trial in which they face 24 and 19 years in prison, respectively. They relieve Cerdán, who left a few days ago, after the deadline in which he could have destroyed evidence. Beyond the coup, which in Ferraz they try to limit to individual behaviors against which they acted from the “first minute”, those involved have begun to send messages that threaten to destabilize the President of the Government before his imprisonment.
“We do not feel blackmailed. We have nothing to fear or hide,” government sources say about the messages that Ábalos and García have sent in recent days. The first was Koldo García, claiming without evidence that he led Sánchez and Cerdán to a meeting with Arnaldo Otegi to negotiate the 2018 motion of censure. Both the president and the leader of EH Bildu have flatly denied that meeting, which Ábalos later confirmed in his own way in X: “I can only say what in-person sources told me, and that is that this interview existed.” The former minister’s entourage pointed to Cerdán to corroborate that version, but sources close to the former Navarrese leader assure that it is “100% false.”
Ábalos later shot the second vice president, Yolanda Díaz, by suggesting that she housed “people without the right” to live in the house assigned to her as Minister of Labor. The leader of Sumar has denied it.
The Government has reacted defensively, refuting each of the accusations made by Ábalos and García, who through Okdiario, just before the hearing that would decide whether to send him to prison provisionally, assured that there was “smurfing” in the 2017 primaries in which Sánchez won against Susana Díaz and Patxi López. When he was still in the police vehicle that was taking him to Soto del Real, El Mundo published an interview with Ábalos – prior to the appointment with the judge – in which he stated: “Investigating Air Europa would be opening the door, there we can get to Begoña. We can get there safely.” Hitting his family is what hurts Sánchez the most. And the former minister knows it very well.
Ábalos’ words, along with his desperate tweets, show a change in strategy. A few months ago, in an interview in El Confidencial, he was elusive about the participation of the president’s wife in that loan to the airline after both the investigations by the UCO and, later, by the Senate commission had concluded without a single piece of evidence of Begoña Gómez’s influence. Just two weeks ago the Madrid Court cut off Peinado’s last maneuver to investigate the rescue in the Gómez case. “At that time it is true that any type of access or resource could have been proposed in order to speed up the process. Whether they did it or not? I don’t know,” Ábalos said in July. From silence it has gone on to attack, even if it is without evidence.
The Government is dedicated to rejecting each and every one of the blows they receive from the once powerful Secretary of Organization and his advisor, aware, however, of the war of attrition they face. “Are you afraid that Ábalos will come into direct clash with the president?” the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, was asked in the halls of Congress. “No,” was his laconic response. Sánchez has tried to give an image of normality by participating in the signing of the agreement with the unions for the increase in the salaries of civil servants just when the man who was his strong man in Ferraz and the Government was on his way to prison.
New strategy as an intention to collaborate with justice
Legal sources point out that Ábalos and García’s new strategy, on the verge of the Supreme Court’s decision on their preventive incarceration, also sought to show their intention to collaborate with Justice by revealing alleged corruption by the Sánchez Government and the PSOE, and they do not rule out that in the near future they will propose, through their lawyers, to testify.
“They have nothing against us,” say government sources, who also reject the possibility that the party or the Government could give them anything they want.
Beyond dodging the blows, Sánchez’s purpose is to encapsulate the cases of corruption in the people affected, although they were the hard core of power, and to give the feeling that the world is not ending. “Rato was vice president. It is serious, but not unprecedented. It is not new, we knew this before the summer,” sources from the Executive pointed out after the judge’s decision to send Ábalos and Koldo to prison.
The PSOE minimizes the damage: “We have already experienced it”
“We have already experienced it. Mr. Santos was on preventive measures. There is nothing new compared to previous occasions,” said Montero in reference to Cerdán’s imprisonment, which was the true catharsis in the socialist ranks, where no one expected that Ábalos’s successor at the head of the organization would be the epicenter of a corrupt plot. “The damage has already been done and we responded,” they point out in the socialist direction, where they insistently remember that Sánchez asked for forgiveness and expelled them immediately.
“From the first minute, we took measures, we acted forcefully, and it is up to the courts,” Montero added. That is Sánchez’s line of defense, who is sure that the excesses of Ábalos, Cerdán and García do not implicate the party or the Government structures. “We do not accept lessons from those who have had B boxes, bonuses or final sentences for corruption. Corruption also portrays those who act against those who look the other way. And there is no doubt: this party will always be among those who act,” the PSOE expressed in a statement in which it points to the PP.
Beyond the undeniable reputational – and, therefore, electoral – damage that Ferraz considers amortized in the face of the corruption cases in which Ábalos, Cerdán and García are accused of a string of crimes, Sánchez has an added problem with the imprisonment of Ábalos: the loss of one seat of the majority that makes up the investiture bloc. However, the legislative capacity of the Government was practically considered lost after the breakup of Junts.
Source: www.eldiario.es
