A corruption trial of a former right-hand man to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez begins on Tuesday in a politically explosive case that has threatened to topple the Socialist-led government.
José Luis Ábalos is a disgraced Socialist heavyweight, a former transport minister who helped propel Sánchez to power in 2018. The case is one of several corruption affairs rattling the fragile coalition.
Ábalos and his former adviser Koldo García are suspected of having pocketed kickbacks for handing out public contracts worth millions of euros for sanitary equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Supreme Court in Madrid will judge them for alleged bribery, embezzlement, influence peddling, membership of a criminal organisation and misuse of confidential information.
The men deny the charges.
Prosecutors want Abalos to serve 24 years in jail, portraying him as the mastermind of a vast illicit scheme. They have called for a 19-year term for Garcia, who they say was a key intermediary.
They argued in court that both men had abused their government positions and contacts to favour the interests of businessman Victor de Aldama, who has already admitted his role in the case.
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Abalos has consistently protested that the investigation has been unfair. “I feel like I am living in a fiction,” he told the conservative daily El Mundo in November, 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.
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“I am in jail without proof that I’ve committed any crime,” he said, speaking by video link from his place of pre-trial detention.
More than 75 witnesses and around 20 experts are set to testify during the proceedings, which are due to run through April.
Succession of scandals
The investigation also appears to have ensnared Ábalos’s successor in the powerful post of Socialist organisation secretary, Santos Cerdán.
Caught up in another case of suspected corruption for public work contracts, he was forced to step down from the position in June 2025.
The fall from grace of Ábalos and Cerdán – two of Sánchez’s closest allies – has embarrassed a leader who rose to power on a promise to clean up Spanish politics.
Sánchez took over from the main conservative Popular Party (PP) after it was engulfed in its own corruption scandal.
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Separate corruption investigations into Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, and his brother David, who faces trial later this year, have piled further pressure on the government – one of few leftist administrations in Europe.
READ ALSO: Judge again seeks jury trial for Spanish PM’s wife
Both the PP and the far-right opposition party Vox have called for Sánchez’s resignation and early elections. They argue that the scandals expose systemic Socialist corruption reaching as far as the premier himself.
Sánchez has always denied any illegal funding of the Socialist party and rebuffed calls for an early vote ahead of the next scheduled general election in 2027.
