Judge Ismael Moreno details that the main people involved in the Koldo case —which is investigating alleged corruption in the purchase of masks by the Ministry of Transportation and other organizations, at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic— knew, at least almost three months before the arrests made last week, that one of them , Víctor de Aldama (businessman and president of the Zamora Football Club), was in the crosshairs of a “police investigation.” The magistrate reaches this conclusion after analyzing a telephone conversation on November 28, which was held around eight thirty in the afternoon by Koldo García, the former advisor of the former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos; and Juan Carlos Cueto, another businessman accused of his alleged participation in the plot. At that time, the Civil Guard kept their cell phones tapped by court order.
This is not the only indication that members of the corrupt network suspected that they were being investigated, according to the summary. On February 3, Ábalos’ former advisor, who had already adopted “security measures”, had a conversation with another of those involved, Rogelio Pujalte, holder of a judicial deposit in Murcia and owner of a commercial company to which the plot transferred allegedly 100,000 euros from the awarded contracts. In that conversation, Pujalte warned Koldo García not to use the instant messaging application Telegram, through which you can also make phone calls. Ábalos’ former advisor responds that he has never used it and tries to reassure his interlocutor by stating that he knows “everything”, and that he also knows “what they are like, how they are, when they are.”
In their conversation, Koldo García assures the Murcian that they are like this “because of the dog.” And, as the Civil Guard concludes, García was referring with those words to De Aldama, who had had to testify before the National Fraud Investigation Office (ONIF, dependent on the Ministry of Finance) after detecting that Management and Support Solutions for Empresas SL had allegedly committed fraud of 200,000 euros in Corporate Tax. That company is the epicenter of the plot that was awarded the million-dollar mask contracts for, among others, the Ministry of Transportation. Pujalte responds: “I, when they tell me after of you, then after The first thing I do is get in touch [sic]”. The investigators assure that, with this, the Murcian businessman “is notifying Koldo that he is being investigated.”
A year earlier, on February 15, 2023, Ábalos’ former advisor had held a meeting with Cueto at the seafood restaurant La Chalana, of Madrid, during which both showed signs of knowing that Aldama was being investigated, although at the time they believed that it was only the ONIF. The conversation between the two was overheard by Civil Guard agents, who followed them. The members of the armed institute reflected in their report that both spoke, precisely, of the inspection that the Tax Agency had opened to De Aldama for the capital gains obtained by two of their companies, MTM 180 Capital and Deluxe Fortune, for intermediating in the contracts of the masks. The two then arranged to meet the next day in a cafeteria on Génova Street, in Madrid, to continue talking about it.
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