FLASH
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Spain's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the detention without legal guarantees of deputy and former Minister of Public Works and Transport, José Luis Ábalos, after considering him a flight risk ahead of his corruption trial.
Prosecutors are seeking a 24-year prison sentence for Ábalos, who was a senior figure in the country's ruling Socialist Party between 2017 and 2021. The politician is being investigated for alleged bribery, influence peddling and embezzlement in connection with public contracts during the Covid pandemic.
The former minister is the first sitting member of Spain's parliament to be imprisoned in the country's modern democratic history. Although he was elected as a member of the Socialist Party, he was suspended from the parliamentary group in 2024, shortly after anti-corruption investigators arrested his former adviser, Koldo García, on suspicion of profiting from the sale of face masks during the pandemic. In a separate hearing, the court on Thursday also ordered García to be held in pretrial detention without bail pending his trial.
Defying calls to leave parliament, Ábalos has spent the past year sitting with the "Mixed Group" of lawmakers from smaller far-left and nationalist political parties, but has consistently voted in favor of bills presented by the Socialists.
His continued support has given Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and his left-wing allies a decisive one-vote advantage over the 171-seat opposition bloc made up of the center-right Popular Party, the far-right Vox group and the Navarrese conservatives.
Although Ábalos's imprisonment means the automatic suspension of his rights as a legislator, he retains his seat until he has exhausted all possible appeals. With the left- and right-wing blocs in Spain's 350-seat parliament tied for the foreseeable future, the fate of the legislation now depends exclusively on the votes of the seven lawmakers representing the Catalan separatist Junts party.
This is bad news for Sanchez, because last month Junts distanced himself from the Socialists and said he would no longer support legislation proposed by the government, as he had done in the past. If Sanchez fails to reach an agreement with Junts, he will have no credible way to pass legislation during his term, which ends in the summer of 2027.
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