The Catalan branch of the Cerdán case: a 62 million euro Adif project in Sant Feliu de Llobregat
This is about burying the train tracks underground, a historic demand of the municipality that had been dragging on for forty years.
BarcelonaThe alleged corruption scheme in the awarding of public works contracts orchestrated by Santos Cerdán, José Luis Ábalos, and Koldo García has shaken the Spanish government and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party). The report from the UCO (University of Catalonia) that has blown up the case includes a list of the projects in which this trio had a hand in collecting illegal commissions totaling hundreds of thousands of euros. Among these illegal commissions, Civil Guard officers point to an Adif contract in Sant Feliu de Llobregat won by the company Acciona Construcción, which is under suspicion for allegedly having paid up to one million euros in bribes to the former minister with the mediation of the former secretary. What's behind this ramification of the case in Catalonia?
The project in the spotlight in Catalonia is the burying of the railway tracks in Sant Feliu de Llobregat, an old demand of the municipality that had been dragging on for forty yearsIn 2009—when the Socialists governed the municipality, the Generalitat (Catalan government), and Madrid—an agreement was reached whereby the State would pay 50%, while the council and the regional government would contribute the remaining 50%. When Comuns regained the mayor's office in 2011, they renegotiated with the Spanish government so that the State would pay for the entire project, a commitment they managed to extract from the then PP Minister of Public Works, Íñigo de la Serna, in 2018. This is how the awarding and payment for not burying the underground remained as "an infrastructure that is state-owned," sources from the then municipal government emphasize.
In 2019, with the PSOE already in power, the tender to award this long-awaited project began. The UCO report states that Koldo and Cerdán discussed this project on April 22, 2019: the former Transport advisor asked Cerdán if "it was clear" what they wanted. That same day, the tender for the file was announced, with an initial amount of 71.5 million. A month and a bit later, Koldo received a message from the president of Adif, Isabel Pardo de Vera, in which she details all the bids they have received from companies in the tender. Among these companies is Acciona Construcción, which had submitted the ninth lowest bid, although it received the highest technical score (39.24 out of 40).
Finally, this company prevails over the rest of the bids in the tender (a total of 16) and In November 2019, Adif awarded the works worth 62.6 million euros.The announcement was headlined in every newspaper, as the works were a long-standing request from residents and resolved a railway blackout that had resulted in dozens of deaths due to people crossing the tracks on foot. The project received European funding. as stated in the file available on the Contracting Platform.
A year later, in November 2020, Sant Feliu's work reappears in a conversation between Koldo and Cerdán, the audio of which is in the hands of the Civil Guard. In this audio, Koldo complains to Ábalos that he is not being paid for some of the bites agreed, including €350,000 from the contract award in Sant Feliu and another project in El Mayor, Murcia.
In 2021, Ábalos ceased to be the Minister of Transport (for now, the Spanish government has not yet clarified the reasons for his departure) and was replaced by the Catalan Raquel Sánchez. When the case broke, the head of the portfolio was already Óscar Puente. Last November, the broker in the Koldo Víctor de Aldama case took a document to court with a list of suspicious contracts, so Puente commissioned the General Directorate of Roads and Adif to prepare a report on all the contracts submitted by the businessman under investigation. It was determined that there was no irregularity. However, the Sant Feliu contract was not one of those indicated, so now sources from the ministry confirm to ARA that they have commissioned Adif to study it, reports Ot Serra.
The municipality regrets the case
When contacted by this newspaper, the Sant Feliu City Council lamented that the underground project, "a civic struggle and example of political consensus," has been marred by this scandal. Sant Feliu de Llobregat is now governed by a coalition of the PSC (Spanish Socialist Workers' Party) and two local candidates, led by Socialist Lourdes Borrell. The Socialists defeated the Commons in the 2023 elections., which meant that the purple party lost a municipality where it has historically performed well. In her last term, Lidia Muñoz – mayor since 2019 – split the mandate with Esquerra, which governed between 2022 and 2023. Sant Feliu de Llobregat has historically been a territory where this space has been governed: it was first in the hands of the PSUC and then the ICV between 1979 and 2020, with Jordi San José, who unblocked the investment in the underground pipeline.
Now that the scandal over the awarding of the works has broken out, city council sources emphasize that the events under the scrutiny of the Civil Guard occurred during the previous term. However, they also emphasize that the tender was 100% run by Adif, in a procedure in which the council played no role. "However, as the City Council, we are firmly convinced that none of our managers are involved," they added. In a statement, En Comú Podem (now in opposition) has demanded that the PSOE collaborate "actively" in the investigation into the plot, "with the utmost transparency and forcefulness." At Sant Feliu, En Comú Podem believes that these events, which link our city with suspicions of corruption in the awarding of public works, seriously damage the reputation of a great city success story, such as the underground railway works," they lament.
Controversies aside, in Sant Feliu, excavators continue working on the three-kilometer stretch of railway tracks that will be buried between the Pahissa stream and the Sanson road. This includes, of course, the installation of overhead lines and the construction of a new station, which was awarded just a month ago for €22 million. The underground construction project was also planned to create new spaces for the city and develop some areas.
