![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/GettyImages-2224262558-1024x683.jpg\")
Spanish Prime Minister speaks during a plenary session at the Spanish Parliament on July 09, 2025 in Madrid, Spain. | Pablo Blazquez Dominguez\/Getty Images<\/p>\nThis isn\u2019t the only scandal affecting the S\u00e1nchez government, is it?<\/p>\n
No. Last June, S\u00e1nchez was forced to apologize after it emerged that his confidant and Socialist Party No. 3, Santos Cerd\u00e1n, was under investigation for involvement in a massive public contract kickback scheme. Also caught up in that scandal was Jos\u00e9 Luis \u00c1balos, a former senior figure in the Socialist Party and transport minister, who had already been under investigation. Deepening the party\u2019s embarrassment, evidence also emerged that \u00c1balos paid prostitutes on a number of occasions. Both men have denied involvement in the kickback scheme.<\/p>\n
Spanish Prime Minister speaks during a plenary session at the Spanish Parliament on July 09, 2025 in Madrid, Spain. | Pablo Blazquez Dominguez\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u00c1balos has already gone on trial once, alongside his former adviser, Koldo Garc\u00eda and businessman V\u00edctor de Aldama, accused of taking kickbacks from the purchase of \u20ac50 million-worth of facemasks during the pandemic. They are awaiting the verdict but are expected to face trial again in the future over other probes.<\/p>\n
That all sounds pretty serious.<\/p>\n
It is, although the immediate fallout from \u00c1balos\u2019 involvement was mitigated by the fact he had left the cabinet in 2021 and was kicked out of the party soon after he came under suspicion, in 2024. The Cerd\u00e1n case was worse because S\u00e1nchez had defended his innocence in the face of lurid media reports, right up until details of the investigation were made public, when he was still a senior figure in the party.<\/p>\n
So the Socialist Party is in the center of the storm here?<\/p>\n
Yes, and on Wednesday, police seized documents from the Socialist headquarters in central Madrid as part of a probe into allegations that party money had been used to pay journalist Leire D\u00edez to wage a campaign to undermine legal cases affecting the government and its allies. She denies any wrongdoing and has claimed she was researching a book. Among those named as suspects in this case are Cerd\u00e1n and Ana Mar\u00eda Fuentes, the Socialist Party\u2019s federal director.\u00a0Separately, D\u00edez is being investigated for misuse of public funds.<\/p>\n
Are there any more cases affecting S\u00e1nchez?<\/p>\n
Yes, actually. In November, the attorney general, \u00c1lvaro Garc\u00eda Ortiz, a government pick, was found guilty of revealing secrets in a highly controversial case. Garc\u00eda Ortiz was accused of making public the tax affairs of the boyfriend of Isabel D\u00edaz Ayuso, the populist, conservative president of the Madrid region, who had committed tax fraud. Although no direct evidence against Garc\u00eda Ortiz was presented, he was barred from office for two years.<\/p>\n
OK, but at least S\u00e1nchez himself is not directly implicated in any of these cases, is he?<\/p>\n
No, but some of his family are. Since 2024, a judge has been zealously investigating the business and professional affairs of his wife, Bego\u00f1a G\u00f3mez, naming her as a suspect in several alleged crimes. Also, S\u00e1nchez\u2019s musician brother, David, is currently on trial in the southern city of Badajoz, accused of influence peddling in his appointment to a local musical director post in 2017. Among his co-defendants are several local Socialist Party members. S\u00e1nchez has drawn a distinction between probes such as those into \u00c1balos and Cerd\u00e1n, and those he deems politically motivated, like the cases involving his brother and his wife, the latter. He has described the latter as an \u201cobscene farce.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This isn\u2019t the only scandal affecting the S\u00e1nchez government, is it? No. Last June, S\u00e1nchez was forced to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[595,190,13613,2046,335,2883,1484,2641,3235,13614,10335,205,17,209,1394,4202,564],"class_list":["post-30779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-airlines","tag-alberto-nunez-feijoo","tag-bailout","tag-catalonia","tag-china","tag-corruption","tag-courts","tag-elections","tag-fraud","tag-jose-luis-rodriguez-zapatero","tag-media","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-spain","tag-spanish-politics","tag-tax","tag-transport","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}