The manager of the PSOE, Mariano Moreno, and an employee of the party, Celia Rodríguez, have denied this Wednesday in the Supreme Court the existence of possible imbalances in the party’s accounting, as stated in a report from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) incorporated into the case being pursued against José Luis Ábalos, Koldo García, Santos Cerdán and Víctor de Aldama. Both have explained that the differences between the amounts of expenses paid that the PSOE had declared and the amounts that those involved in seized conversations talked about, sometimes accompanied by photos with envelopes of money, respond to the fact that the amounts were not exclusively for Ábalos but that they included the reimbursements that had to be made to other members of the Organization Secretariat.
Celia Rodríguez explained that Koldo García was in charge of distributing that money among the members of the Organization Secretariat who had put out of their own pockets for expenses linked to the party, sources present in the statement reported. If these amounts are added, he explained, the amounts add up, he added.
For his part, manager Moreno has insisted that all the cash has legal origin, the only account that the PSOE has in a bank, and that the withdrawals are justified and came from the aforementioned account. In this way, both witnesses have agreed with the thesis conveyed in the document delivered by the PSOE last Friday at the Supreme Court, in which the supporting documents for cash withdrawals from 2017 to 2024 for a total value of almost one million euros are attached.
Moreno, according to the aforementioned sources, has admitted that there was no control over whether the expenses incurred by Ábalos and the rest of the party members had a justification in the activity within its framework, but that in any case they were common expenses for meals, trips or plane flights. One of the lawyers even asked him if a ticket for paying for a bicycle would have passed the filter and Moreno responded no.
The statement by the former manager and the person in charge of the PSOE cash desk comes days after the party registered a writing in which it detailed the cash payments since 2017 to Ábalos, Koldo García, Cerdán and the Training Organization Secretariat to settle certain supposedly justified expenses. The party acknowledged that it managed almost one million euros in cash for all types of training expenses during the years covered by the Supreme Court investigation (2017-2024). All of these funds came from its official account, funded by the legal subsidies received by the party.
The judge summoned Moreno and Rodríguez after the UCO detected “the existence of certain communications relating to possible cash payments of certain amounts” to both Ábalos and Koldo García by the PSOE that “would not appear” due to their dates or amounts in the information provided by the party to the high court.
The judge pointed out that, in some cases, the conversations seized from Koldo García “make it possible to establish a correlation between the messages that point to money deliveries and the settlements of expenses” facilitated by the training. In others, however, “said correspondence could not be confirmed.” These amounts delivered would only be reflected in the conversations, but not in the information provided by the PSOE.
The judge summoned both after Ábalos and Koldo García exercised their right not to testify on July 15 and 16. The magistrate argued that since they had not provided any information in this regard, he summoned both PSOE workers so that they could provide information and deduce, where appropriate, the corresponding testimonies for their eventual investigation.
