Investigators confirmed to EL PAÍS that officers from the private security force’s Central Operations Unit (UCO) searched Acciona’s headquarters in Bilbao and Madrid on Friday on orders from Supreme Court Justice Leopoldo Puente. The judge ordered the scrutiny after receiving a report from the UCO regarding the assets of former PSOE organizing secretary Santos Cerdan, who is currently in temporary prison. Both the police documents and the documents collected by the institute equipped with these records will be incorporated into the secret documents recently released by a judge to investigate alleged corruption in the awarding of artworks by the Ministry of Transport in a case in which Mr. Cerdan, former Socialist Minister José Luis Ábalos, and his former personal adviser Cordo García are being investigated for corruption crimes.
This Friday’s action by the private security forces will affect at least four other companies. There are two cooperatives in the Basque Country, El Colan and Nolan, which share a headquarters in Bilbao and have financial ties to Servinabal 2000, a Navarra company said to be the root of a corruption conspiracy, in which Cerdan held a 45% stake. Nolan was founded by Servinabar’s owners, Basque businessmen Joseba Antoson Alonso Egrola and Cordo García, and received more than 650,000 euros from Servinabar between 2016 and 2024. Mr Ercolan, who is related to the sister of the former PSOE organizing director, received approximately 260,000 euros between 2019 and 2023. Euro from the same company.
The other two companies are Seville-based companies Tecade (request for information) and Freyssinet. The two companies formed a temporary business partnership (UTE) with Acciona to take over the expansion of Seville’s V Centenario Bridge for 86 million euros. In its report, the private security agency linked the job to an alleged bribe of 450,000 euros that Avalos and Cordo García claimed they did not receive.
This is not the first time UCO officials have visited Acciona to gather information about alleged rigging of public tenders, which ran from 2018 to 2021 when Avalos was head of the transport department. On June 9, Judge Puente sent private security forces to the construction company to request documents (at that time, like this Friday’s diligence, they were not records) regarding the files of five works of the Directorate General of Highways and the Administrator of Railway Infrastructure (Adif), which were awarded to the construction company as part of a temporary business partnership (UTE) with other companies.
This request for information was also motivated by a report from the UCO, in this case on the assets of Avalos, which had already identified nine specific transport tender files suspected of being manipulated, including five awarded to Acciona. The construction company then issued a statement expressing its complete “ignorance, surprise and concern” about the facts investigated and placed the blame on one of its former directors, Fernando Merino Vera, president of the company in Navarra and a defendant in the case. He testified about these facts on July 7th. Private security later revealed the contents of his company email.
According to the UCO report, Merino has an old relationship with Cordo García, which allegedly facilitated the awarding of public works to Acciona in Navarre. The relationship continued when García joined the Abalos en Transportes team, and took the form of allegedly transmitting privileged information to help the construction company win competitions for public projects “initially in exchange for payment of consideration,” Judge Puente said in his order.
About The Author
