Pedro Andrés López Vera, general director of Public Works of the Government of Navarra since 2019, has declared before the Senate commission that he approved the awarding of the Belate works to the UTE formed by Acciona-Osés and Servinabar, the company in which Santos Cerdán participates, despite the individual votes of six technicians from the contracting table and the irregularities noted by the Office of Good Practices and Anti-Corruption, because “He had no other possibility” since the European Commission has an infringement file open in this regard and he, furthermore, could not modify the report in favor of the contracting table, decided by the vote of its president, Miguel Polo.
López Vera has assured that the work on the Belate tunnels “keeps him awake” and that his greatest effort is to “solve it once and for all.” The situation, he said, is “very worrying” since there is a risk that Brussels will force the closure of the tunnels and even both he and the Minister of Public Works will incur criminal and civil liabilities.
He also explained that the Public Works workforce in the Navarrese Government is in a “limited situation due to lack of technical personnel and there is no room for maneuver.” This explains, according to him, why Miguel Polo was kept as president of the works contracting table despite the fact that he was over retirement age. “There were no alternatives; we were trapped,” he said.
Polo’s presence was decisive for the works to be awarded to the Acciona-Osés-Servinabar joint venture. In this regard, López has assured that Polo’s work was “correct” and for this reason he has stressed that he disagrees with the report against the Anti-Corruption Office as well as with the six dissenting votes that several members of the board signed.
López Vera has insisted that he could not modify the panel’s report but has also stated that he had no doubts regarding the award to the UTE because Acciona, one of the companies with the most experience in this type of works, was part of it. Furthermore, he has assured that he was not surprised that Servinabar was present in the UTE, a company of which he has assured that he had “no idea” that it was owned by the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE, currently in preventive detention, Santos Cerdán, nor that relatives of members of the PSOE worked there, nor that it only had five employees and its qualification was not for carrying out works but for economic and tax advice for companies. According to the law, no company owned by political officials can be awarded public works.
López Vera has stated that when he was appointed general director in 2019 he did not know Santos Cerdán at all but, subsequently, he did participate “in two meetings” with him, although neither of them addressed Belate’s works. “My relationship with him,” he said, “has been very superficial.” He has also added that he does not know the former minister José Luis Ábalos.
The general director has explained that Belate is subject to an infringement file from the European Commission – there were 63 other tunnels in Spain on file but all of them are already under resolution – and that, in addition, the work is delayed and its completion is not expected until 2028. For this reason, he has insisted that there is a possibility that the Commission will force the closure of the tunnels, thus forcing traffic to be diverted through the port with a significant risk of accident rate. That is why, he insisted, the department “tries to accelerate the awarding” of the works.
The general director, in response to questions from the PSOE, has assured that the award of the work to the Acciona-Osés-Servinabar joint venture has not been appealed by anyone and is fully in force. The socialists therefore conclude that the awarding of the work was carried out in strict compliance with the law and under pressure from the European Commission because “for 15 years the previous Governments of Navarra did nothing.”
For the popular ones, given Cerdán’s participation in Servinabar, the awarding of the Belate works has cost the former Secretary of Organization of the PSOE a total of six million euros. López Vera has pointed out that last week he signed the assumption by Acciona of all of Servinabar’s participation in the work.