The investigation commissions on the Koldo case and the purchase of healthcare material during the pandemic have become intertwined with the beginning of the Catalan pre-campaign. There has been a competition to see which of the commissions would call former Minister of Health and PSC candidate for the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, first, and ultimately that appearance will happen first in the Congress. Illa will appear on Monday, April 22, one day after the Basque elections and four days before the formal start of the Catalan campaign for the elections on May 12. Illa will also appear on Wednesday, April 24, at the Senate commission promoted by the PP, which focuses exclusively on the Koldo case of alleged corruption in the purchase of masks. The PSOE has agreed with its parliamentary partners to include former socialist minister José Luis Ábalos (expelled from the party for his alleged responsibility in the Koldo case) in its initial list of witnesses. The President of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, will also be in that commission, but not her brother or her partner.
The two investigation commissions will start next week, influenced by the tight electoral calendar. The start of the testimonies reveals the direction their respective promoters want their work sessions to go in the next four months, which is the initial time frame that has been accepted. In both cases, the sessions could be extended and new requests for witnesses added, but the PSOE has reached an agreement with its partners on Tuesday, trying to score a political goal against the PP: the Congress will call former Minister Salvador Illa on the first day, Monday at 16:00. When Illa appears in the Senate, the political impact of his interrogation will have diminished significantly as he will have already gone through the Congress hearing. The President of the Congress commission, socialist Alejandro Soler, revealed on Tuesday after the first meeting to define the work plan that he had chosen to summon Enriqueta Chicano, President of the Court of Auditors, on Monday morning, and then Illa in the afternoon. Although the PSOE and its allies agreed on up to 134 witnesses, Soler only announced the date of those two summonses. The others are yet to be confirmed.
The opposition parties, PP and Vox, criticized the large number of witness requests, calling it a sham, and stating that the PSOE does not intend to clarify anything. They were the only ones to oppose the initial work program. PP representative Elías Bendodo even went as far as to denigrate the Congress commission as an attempt to cover up corruption and win favor with Pedro Sánchez. Junts and ERC supported the first plan but announced that they would request more witnesses in the future and demanded that the PSOE call former Minister José Luis Ábalos due to his personal and professional relationship with Koldo García. The PSOE did not initially include Ábalos as a witness in order not to upset him further.
The partners of the PSOE also requested and secured the summoning of two alleged leaders of the Koldo case, businessmen Víctor Aldama and Juan Carlos Cueto. The PSOE wants to call some of Ayuso’s closest political collaborators to the commission in the future. The socialists have rejected, in this initial phase, including opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo as a witness, as some of their partners requested. The PSOE, Sumar, and their allies already have a list of witnesses for the Congress commission, including the President of the Cortes and the Minister of Health, due to their previous responsibilities in the Balearic and Canary Islands governments, who contracted with Koldo’s companies. The PSOE, Sumar, and their allies will also call other regional presidents and political figures related to the Koldo case.
