Yesterday's operation took place within the investigation that is being followed in the National Court for possible corruption in various public works. This is a separate piece within the Koldo case, opened after it was detected that the sale of medical supplies during the pandemic did not seem to have been the only business in the plot.
On June 5, 2025, the UCO delivered an extensive report to the Supreme Court, where José Luis Ábalos, then a deputy and registered member, was being investigated. The 490 pages contained indications of irregularities in 11 awards totaling 900 million euros. There were 490 pages with a thesis: that between 2018 and 2021 the Ministry of Transport favored certain companies "on a recurring basis."
The same day the report arrived, the instructor of the Koldo case in the Supreme Court, Leopoldo Puente, formed a separate piece that he declared secret. Four days later he issued several entry and registration orders and requests for documentation. He then commissioned the National Court to investigate the former president of Adif, Isabel Pardo de Vera, and the general director of Highways, Javier Herrero, who were not certified. This is what Judge Ismael Moreno did within the Koldo case, as separate piece number 8, which he called "Public Work Contracts."
When Ábalos stopped being a deputy, he also passed into the hands of the Court. In addition, his former advisor Koldo García and the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, Santos Cerdán, appear as investigated in the case. They are accompanied by executives from Acciona, the main beneficiary of the alleged illegalities, and from the construction companies OPR and LIC.
In March, a report that Anti-Corruption had commissioned from the General Intervention of the State Administration (Igae) arrived at the Court. It detected irregularities in the 11 contracts under suspicion, five corresponding to Adif and six to the General Directorate of Highways. The initial clue to review precisely those 11 had been the information provided by the investigated businessman Víctor de Aldama, added to the exchange of messages in which those investigated mentioned the works.
The report indicates that in the five awards in which Acciona was the winner - alone or in a joint venture - upward modifications to the initial contract were detected that were suspiciously close to a 20% increase in the budget. This is the threshold at which controls become stricter.
Furthermore, in several of the tenders, modifications to the contract were approved that did not comply with the regulations. In some cases, they were of such magnitude that they should have led to the termination of the contract. In others, what should have been a modification was tendered as an independent contract, and subjective evaluations were used so that it fell to the same company as the first contract.
In the case of the three main ADIF contracts, it was detected that before starting the works the contractor already raised "defects" that forced modifications. The Igae points out that, in some cases, the regulations were breached because the "unforeseeable" circumstances that were alleged were not such.
In the case of the burying of the AVE in Murcia, the Igae indicates that the project "should not have been processed as an independent project, but rather as a modified one." "Surely the fact of processing it as an independent project was due to the fact that, if it was processed as modified, the modifications would exceed 20% of the original contract," he adds.
Regarding some works on the A-68, it says that the modification of the contract "should not have been processed", since the sum of the modifications classified as "non-substantial" exceeded "the legal threshold allowed by the European Directive and the Public Sector Contracts Law."
On the other hand, the valuation formulas allowed the subjective part of scoring to guarantee that the objective part - the price - was not enough to decide which company was the winner. In this regard, the Igae questions the actions of Adif and Carreteras in nine of the 11 contracts reviewed.
Regarding one of the two formulas used in Highways, the Igae says: «As can be seen, the formula allows the differences in scores of the criteria based on value judgments to be significantly increased, making it very difficult for the one who has obtained the best score in value judgments not to be the successful bidder. It is not possible to see what justification there is for the application of the indicated formula, which allows small differences, which are always easier to justify by the valuer, to be transformed into large differences.
The irregularities also cover the price of new materials in the case of the Centenario Bridge work in Seville. One material was changed for another, raising the price by 7.4 million. And that's starting from an initial price that, according to Igae, should have been lower.
