The accountant of the public company Red.es Claudia C. has reported to the Police that a superior ordered her to delete accounting information from an award to the businessman Juan Carlos Barrabés, a friend of Begoña Gómez. The Central Operative Unit (UCO) and the European Prosecutor’s Office are investigating three awards from that public company to the businessman for whom the wife of the Prime Minister wrote letters of recommendation.
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The complaint focuses on one of those awards, won in 2021 by the UTE formed by Innova Next -belonging to the Barrabés Group- and the consulting firm KPMG. This tender was processed “in parallel,” according to the Civil Guard, to two others that had the written support of the Prime Minister’s wife. The woman has presented the Police with the unaltered documents.
According to the complaint, accessed by EL MUNDO, the employee received instructions to alter data from one of the contracts currently being analyzed by the UCO and, afterwards, to permanently delete any evidence of those actions. The direct order, according to her version, was to delete the change “permanently”, “without referring to the file” and “only indicating IT’S DONE”.
Convinced that the orders could cover up irregular conduct, the accountant decided to go to the Police on July 16 and hand over to the investigators the original documentation of the file, as well as the content prior to the modifications, in order to preserve the traceability of the changes made. Specifically, it concerns file 044/20-ED, one of the three under scrutiny by the Armed Institute for possible misconduct in favor of the offers submitted by Barrabés. The accountant reveals that the Deputy Assistant Director of Administration and Finance, Guillermo Tapia Poza, sent her an email on July 14 ordering her to delete “all” accounting information from the file.
She specifies that she complied, but once she executed the orders, she sent an email to her superior that he later asked her to delete. According to the complaint, she “made the referred changes, but before sent an email from her corporate account to her boss’s account indicating that she was going to carry out the accounting reclassification of the entries but that she was unaware of the new dates to be incorporated since these entries belonged to the years 2021, 2022, and 2023″.
The Red.es accountant insists on her superior’s concern that she leave no trace of the changes. At 9:37 a.m. on July 16, her boss requested a video call in which he told her “that she had to share the screen of her work computer, as well as had to permanently delete the sent email regarding the file in question”. She deleted this email in front of her boss.
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Three hours later, at 12:10 p.m., Tapia again addressed his subordinate. Through another video call, “he again asked her to share her work desktop and to delete from the deleted folder the previously deleted email, all to avoid any type of recovery.” The employee explains in the complaint that she made the changes because, she specifies, “it was a direct order from her hierarchical superior“. However, her feeling that this situation could “be irregular” led her to recover the deleted email and take a screenshot. The accountant hired by the public company has provided the Police with all the original files of the accounting years 2022 and 2023, as well as the invoices for “payments to the company UTE KPMG Asesores SL”. There are about fifty that total 863,000 euros.
The file affected by the complaint has been in the hands of the European Prosecutor’s Office since last month, which thus takes over from Judge Juan Carlos Peinado, who was competent until now regarding this tender. The other two files under suspicion have been in the hands of the European Prosecutor’s Office since 2024.
The reports from the UCO and the European Prosecutor’s Office point to maneuvers within Red.es so that the offers linked to Barrabés won million-euro public contracts. Before the letters of recommendation signed by Gómez, no company from his group had won tenders in this public entity.
The agents detected an artificial and arbitrary adjustment of the scores of the offers to benefit Barrabés. The report includes internal communications showing how the process was guided with phrases like “yours is the right one“.
Barrabés admitted before Justice that he decisively helped Begoña Gómez design the contents of the Master in Competitive Social Transformation at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). The businessman provided his own management and technical team to act as associate professors in Gómez’s chair. Furthermore, he went from being the main advisor and backbone of Gómez’s educational project to becoming the recurring bidder recommended by her before the Government.
