Jessica Rodriguez, Ábalos' ex-partner who received money from public companies without going to work
In a statement as a witness in the Supreme Court for the Koldo case, he admitted that he lived in an apartment without knowing who paid him the rent of 2,700 euros a month.
Madrid"Public money has never been used." At the beginning of September last year, José Luis Ábalos denied in an interview with Onda Cero that the expenses generated by the fact that his ex-partner, Jéssica Rodríguez, accompanied him on official trips had had an impact on the public treasury. "I paid for it out of my own pocket," he said, although the management was done by his former advisor in the Ministry of Transport, Koldo García. Ábalos thus responded to information from Onda Cero that The Objective which included an alleged email from 2019 in which Jéssica Rodríguez demanded that he pay her between 1,000 and 1,500 euros a day for having acted as an escort. This Thursday, in a statement as a witness in the Supreme Court in the framework of the alleged corruption case for which both Ábalos and Koldo are being investigated, Rodríguez stated that she received money from two public companies without going to work.
Ábalos' ex-partner was first employed by Ineco and then by Tragsatec, public companies that depend on Transport and SEPI, respectively. According to legal sources cited by Europa Press, Ábalos' ex-partner acknowledged that she received money, but not that she went to work. They were temporary contracts as an administrator. Now, Rodríguez has disassociated the former minister from her contracts, assuring that she never asked him to place her anywhere, although she has admitted that she was hired through the intermediation of Koldo's brother, Joseba García, who had a relationship with both companies. In his statement as investigated, Koldo acknowledged that he asked his brother for a "favor" to get him the job and that he was chosen because he was a "trustworthy" person.
Jéssica Rodríguez has garnered media attention in recent months and has been summoned to the Supreme Court because she appears as the beneficiary of the alleged compensation that the commissioner of the mask plot, Víctor de Aldama, would have given to Ábalos in exchange for contract awards. The minister's ex-partner appears in one of the Civil Guard reports on the case. "From 2018, when he was appointed minister, and well into 2022, he would have had a private relationship with a third person called Jéssica," the document states, which stresses that it was not his wife. Ábalos' ex-partner has admitted that from March 2019 until the same month of 2022 she lived in a flat in Madrid without paying rent. The monthly payment was 2,700 euros, and she said she did not know who paid them, although it was thanks to Koldo that she lived there. According to the Civil Guard, it was an indirect payment made by the plot to Ábalos, and in the same report it put the total amount that Aldama would have paid to rent the property at 82,298.
A "normal" relationship
Several reports have linked Rodríguez to prostitution, although Ábalos denied in the same interview with Onda Cero that he paid her the amounts that had been published in the digital (between 1,000 and 1,500 euros) for her to go on a trip with him. The former minister stated that he had a relationship "like those that all people normally have." However, Ábalos said that it was "difficult" and "abnormal" because he was married. He did not get divorced until he stopped being Minister of Transport, removed in 2021 by Pedro Sánchez. Ábalos regretted that he is constantly being linked to prostitution and, in fact, he recently reported to the police that a prostitution website had used his image as an advertising claim.