Corruption probes targeting former Socialist heavyweights and Sanchez’s wife have embarrassed a leader who took office in 2018 pledging to clean up Spanish politics after the conservative opposition was convicted in its own graft scandal.
The hours-long hearing before a Senate committee will grill Sanchez over a complicated affair involving alleged kickbacks in exchange for public contracts for sanitary equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The scandal has ensnared ex-transport minister Jose Luis Abalos and former senior Socialist official Santos Cerdan, both former close allies of Sanchez who helped him rise to power. Abalos’s former adviser Koldo Garcia is another key suspect in the case that has seen Cerdan jailed and police enter Socialist headquarters in Madrid, in damaging images for Sanchez.
The opposition conservative Popular Party (PP), which commands a majority in the Senate, aims to prove that Sanchez knew about or participated in the murky manoeuvres. The summoning of Sanchez is part of its relentless focus on alleged Socialist corruption in a bid to force early elections that would return it to power.
“You will lie again tomorrow in the Senate because you know that if you tell the truth, it will be the end of you,” PP leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo told Sanchez in parliament on Wednesday. The prime minister has repeatedly apologised for the scandal but denied knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing or that the Socialists benefited from illegal funding.
A damning police report in the summer that implicated Cerdan in the scandal briefly threatened to rip apart the Socialist-led coalition with the far-left Sumar party. But Sanchez has rebuffed opposition calls to resign and call early elections, although he has acknowledged he once considered quitting as the pressure grew.
In July, he unveiled a package of anti-corruption measures in a bid to repair ties with Sumar and an array of fringe and regional separatist parties without which the government cannot pass legislation.
Platform with AFP
