Spain’s audit court opens a case to recover money from allegedly rigged Adif rail contracts

Rebeca Laliga, who heads the court’s prosecution section, started the case after the court’s own prosecutor backed it, Qué! and HerQles reported, citing El Mundo. It rests on an audit of Adif, the state rail infrastructure manager, that the court approved last December. The audit, by councilor José Manuel Otero Lastres, points to at least two EU-funded contracts worth €85 million awarded to Obras Públicas y Regadíos (OPR), a builder that judges later placed in the so-called Koldo case, the corruption probe tied to former transport minister José Luis Ábalos and his adviser Koldo García.

According to the audit, Adif received two complaints through its internal ethics channel in 2022 saying scores in works tenders had been falsified to favor one company, and shelved them with laxity and without proper rigor. The warning came from Ineco, another state-owned firm: an Adif employee allegedly told two Ineco engineers to change their technical scores on three tenders, citing an order from a superior. Adif’s former president, Pedro Marco de la Peña, defended the awards in writing to the court and denied any rigging.

The audit court’s case is not criminal. Its job is to put a number on the loss and recover it, including by freezing the assets of anyone held liable who does not pay. A separate criminal investigation belongs to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which searched Adif, the rail safety agency AESF and the Tribunal de Cuentas itself on November 6, HerQles reported. Guardia Civil agents visited the court on Friday with a request for information.

The case is at an early stage. Investigators still have to work out which awards were rigged, compare them with the bids that lost and identify who answers for the loss, which Qué! notes could be hard to pin down if the officials involved were following orders. Adif’s leadership expects the case to be closed.