The investigating judge of the ‘Koldo case’ has called to declare Juan Carlos Cueto as a defendant for the alleged illegal collection of commissions for the purchase of masks . Cueto would be, according to the investigations, one of the key names and alleged mastermind of the plot by controlling ‘de facto’ the company Soluciones de Gestión y Apoyo a Empresas SL, the company that was awarded the purchase of masks that are now being investigated. .
Although he was already listed as under investigation in the first investigations, Cueto had not been arrested as he was abroad when the police arrests and searches began last Tuesday, and he would remain outside of Spain. He will now have to give a statement before Judge Ismael Moreno this Wednesday.
Koldo García, behind the then Minister of Development, José Luis Ábalos, in an image from 2019.Juan Carlos Cueto is one of the key names in the ‘Koldo case’
The investigating judge of the ‘Koldo case’ has called to declare Juan Carlos Cueto as a defendant for the alleged illegal collection of commissions for the purchase of masks . Cueto would be, according to the investigations, one of the key names and alleged mastermind of the plot by controlling ‘de facto’ the company Soluciones de Gestión y Apoyo a Empresas SL, the company that was awarded the purchase of masks that are now being investigated. .
Although he was already listed as under investigation in the first investigations, Cueto had not been arrested as he was abroad when the police arrests and searches began last Tuesday, and he would remain outside of Spain. He will now have to give a statement before Judge Ismael Moreno this Wednesday.
Cueto, one of the key names of the ‘Koldo case’
Juan Carlos Cueto Martín is the leader of the Cueto group , the business network that controls Soluciones de Gestión y Apoyo a Empresas SL, the company linked to the purchase of masks during the pandemic, for which illegal commissions worth more than 50 million euros.
Although he does not appear in the social bodies of the conglomerate after a police investigation in 2017, the investigations indicate that he would control the company and would have been “in fact” responsible for the contracts investigated , for which they would have used Soluciones de Management and Support of Companies as an “instrumental company”. A company that was established in 2017 and in 2020, the year of the allegedly irregular contracts, had income of 54 million euros (a year later they fell to 845,670 euros in 2021).
Cueto would be one of the key figures, along with Koldo García and Víctor de Aldama , in the plot for which the businessman would have allegedly received 9.6 million euros .
His name is not unknown to Justice
Cueto is not unknown to the Spanish justice system: in 2017 he was involved in ‘Operation Trajano’ , a corruption scandal involving the public firm Mercasa (the judge ordered preventive detention for him), and in the ‘Defex case’, a plot in which he was accused of rigging arms sales contracts in Angola and in which Cueto and others involved would have obtained 117 million euros from arms contracts in the African country. For this case, still pending trial, Anticorruption is asking for 50 years and seven months in prison for him .
This is a conversation between the businessman who is key to the plot around the former minister’s advisor, in which he addresses how to get away with an inspection of the company that benefited from the transport contracts.
A telephone tap in the Delorme operation points to the participation of José Luis Ábalos in the maneuvers to favor the company that benefited from the contracts of the Ministry of Transportation when he was in charge of the department.
The Civil Guard intercepted the phones of the main people involved and on December 4, they captured this conversation between the key businessman in the operation, Juan Carlos Cueto, and another of the accused, Iñigo Rotaeche.
“Cueto calls Iñigo and comments: ‘this was a favor that your neighbor (Koldo) was asking… him and his former boss… and it seems that the other one said yes… because they have given another favor in return.'”
This is stated by the judge in Thursday’s resolutions in which he agreed to the provisional release of four detainees. The conversation is one of many in which those investigated addressed how to succeed in the inspection that the Treasury had underway on Management Solutions, the company that benefited from more than 52 million public contracts.
Koldo is Koldo García , Ábalos’s right-hand man for years and advisor in the Ministry of Transportation when the investigated awards were made in the middle of the pandemic. The “boss”, therefore, would be Ábalos himself, at that time also Secretary of Organization of the PSOE.