The PP has started the week trying to collect a new political piece from the PSOE at the highest level, that of the president of the Congress of Deputies and former president of the Government of the Balearic Islands, Francina Armengol. The party demands her resignation as the third authority of the State, accusing her of being a “necessary collaborator” in the corrupt plot of the Koldo case based on “doubts” and “suspicions”. The spokesman for the Popular Parliamentary Group, Miguel Tellado, registered this Monday in Congress a document in which he demands the dismissal of Armengol as president of the Lower House due to the derivative of the Koldo case in the Balearic Islands. Later, in a brief appearance before the media, he based his accusations against socialist politics on conjecture.
Miguel Tellado has described Francina Armengol as a “necessary collaborator” of the corrupt plot, an expression that refers to a figure with criminal significance, that of the necessary collaborators, who Criminal Law punishes as perpetrators of a crime. According to article 28 of the Penal Code, “those who cooperate in its execution with an act without which it would not have been carried out” are also authors of a crime.
The PP now attacks Armengol because during her time as president of the Balearic Islands, the Government that she presided over and in the midst of the covid pandemic (2020), she bought 1.4 million masks from the plot, of which she investigated their quality and found that it was lower than what was promised. The PP focuses there on the fact that the former Balearic president took almost three years to request the return of 2.6 million euros of that contract. The company Soluciones de Gestión, recommended by Koldo García, main advisor to the then minister José Luis Ábalos, has been litigating for 11 months with the Government of the Balearic Islands – now in the hands of the PP – for the alleged non-compliance in the sale of these inferior quality masks. to the engaged one. The investigation has not been able to prove, at the moment, whether anyone in the plot contacted PP leaders. Nor has it yet been proven that the former Minister of Transport José Luis Ábalos, affected by the corrupt plot in which his former advisor, Koldo García, is accused, has mediated to have the claim withdrawn. Nor is there evidence in the summary that illegal commissions were paid to political leaders or officials of the Balearic Administration.
The parliamentary spokesperson of the PP has launched a criminal accusation against the socialist president of Congress, basing it on conjectures and assumptions, as he himself has acknowledged in his appearance before journalists, in which he has used the expressions of “doubts” and “suspicions.” . “The Spaniards do not deserve that the third authority of the State be under the shadow of doubt,” Tellado stated in the Lower House, before asking the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, to stop politically supporting “a person marked by the suspicion”.
The PP spokesperson in Congress has also stated that the PP’s rejection of Armengol as president of Parliament predates the Koldo case: “Armengol should never have been appointed, she was never suitable for the position she occupies. And she was never up to the task. But today, with everything we know, she is doing enormous damage to this institution and every day her presence devalues the prestige of the Congress of Deputies.”
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Tellado has stressed that “the Government of the Balearic Islands is being investigated by the justice system for purchasing masks due to an administrative process riddled with irregularities.” And he concluded: “he paid for masks that were useless knowing that they were a scam. “He ended up paying for the Ferraris of those involved in the plot.”
The PSOE spokesperson, Esther Peña, has come out in defense of Armengol, disqualifying the opposition’s criticism as “barbarities.” “The PP’s request has no basis nor is it based on any constitutional article or any article of the regulations of the Congress of Deputies itself. In moments of speculation and atrocities we must stick to reality,” she defended. “The PSOE is not asking for explanations from anyone who does not appear in the summary of the case or in other documents linked to it,” he added, in reference to Tellado, whom Koldo García refers to in one of the conversations intervened in the investigation of the alleged corrupt plot. Socialist sources add that “in the Balearic Islands no one has been arrested or charged, no one is investigated, no crime is charged to anyone, no one from the Government is accused of stealing money, but the PP and its media arm are given same that. The striking thing is that precisely if someone is investigated in the Balearic Islands, it is the PP.”
The socialists also argue that “the Government of the Balearic Islands was in any case harmed by the plot; never part of it, no matter how much the PP continues to take administrative documents out of context from a file that the Intervention and justice itself consider valid and completely legal.” The socialist sources emphasize that “the Government of the Balearic Islands only bought masks from a shipment that arrived for the ministry and did so with the full legal basis of emergency contracts and at market prices (which prevented us from suspecting any corruption plot behind them). )”. “The only thing the judge is investigating in what is known as the ‘Balearic branch’ is the current PP government because he suspects that the company pressured him and managed to make the claim initiated in March by the Armengol government expire,” they emphasize.
The arguments of the then Balearic Government of the PSOE and Armengol’s entourage emphasize that the masks ordered and contracted from the company in the plot were “neither a fraud nor a scam, nor were they totally useless.” And they emphasize that now the PP is trying to mix everything up to sow suspicions and doubts about an issue that they describe as technical. In this sense, the same sources indicate that the Balearic government claimed part of the money given because its own health services examined it in a laboratory and questioned the quality of the purchased masks, which were KN95, inferior in their filtration capacity to the FFP2 ones. In fact, this claim is not about the total contract, but about the price difference between these two types of masks. And regarding the delay in submitting the claim (almost three years, because the procedure began in March 2023, at the end of the legislature and three months before an election), it is explained that the administrative services first had other preferences with the pandemic and then All procedures were delayed due to teleworking.
But the PP has continued to press during the morning to demand political responsibilities from Armengol, although in an appearance at the PP headquarters on Génova Street, the party spokesperson, Borja Sémper, has admitted the possibility that the president of the Congress has been a “victim” of the plot. In any case he has insisted that she should resign. “In any of the circumstances, whether she is an accomplice or a victim, Mrs. Armengol currently holds the third authority of the State. She holds the highest parliamentary representation in this country. And the high responsibilities and the exercise of them require us politicians to have a reinforced commitment to dignity in the exercise of political responsibility,” the spokesperson reflected.
At her side, the deputy secretary of the PP, Esther Muñoz, maintained a different version a few minutes later, rejecting that the president of Congress could be considered a victim of the case. Muñoz has stated this when answering the question of why the Madrid City Council, governed by the popular José Luis Martínez-Almeida, did not claim the seven million euros that businessmen Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño swindled from the City Council in masks. Almeida then declared himself a victim of that other corrupt plot that profited during the pandemic. “I am not aware of this matter of the City Council and the person who can best respond is the mayor of Madrid. But President Armengol is the third authority of the State. The information we are learning is not that she was the victim of a scam, it is that she knew what was happening with those masks and despite that she changed the specifications so that they were paid for with European funds and issued a quality seal so that others administrations contracted with the plot. “She has absolutely nothing to do with it,” Esther Muñoz justified. The popular deputy secretary has also defended that the Koldo case It is “probably the biggest case of corruption of a government in office since Felipe González.”
The president of Congress, in parallel, has canceled an appearance that was scheduled for this Monday at nine in the morning at the inauguration of the XI Economics Forum, of the Center for Public Policy and Government Studies of the University of Alcalá, for which He had confirmed his attendance on Friday. The secretary of the Board, the socialist Isaura Leal, who is the one who attended the event, has apologized for Armengol’s absence due to scheduling reasons and has confirmed that the president of the Cortes had the intention of attending. Then, at 12:00, she did attend, but without making any statement, the institutional visit of the president of the National Assembly of Ecuador, Henry Fabián Kronfle Kozhaya, to Congress. Parliamentary sources close to him point out that Armengol is studying legal actions to defend him against some accusations received these days.
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