The former Secretary of State for Transport and former president of Adif, Isabel Pardo de Vera, has made a move after the Supreme Court considered her a key player in getting the former minister José Luis Ábalos‘s ex-lover,Jésica Rodríguez, into two public companies dependent on Transport, Ineco and Tragsatec. The investigated party, however, was met with a ‘slamming door’ from the Criminal Chamber.
Pardo de Vera believes that, with its ruling on the mask case, the High Court has violated her fundamental rights to effective judicial protection, to the presumption of innocence, and to defense. The Supreme Court, however, has rejected her arguments.
Her lawyer Gonzalo Rodríguez Mourullo had addressed the court to urge, by way of an incident of nullity, the purification of the prejudicial statements in the aforementioned judgment, “eliminating” or “nuancing” them.”It is necessary to react now to the Judgment of June 22, 2026, precisely to prevent the statements it contains from irreparably harming Isabel Pardo de Vera in said procedure, limiting her fundamental rights,” the lawyer maintained.
Specifically regarding Pardo de Vera, the unanimous and firm judgment of the Criminal Chamber stressed that “the president of Adif entrusted direct efforts to secure the hiring of Jésica Rodríguez and carried out the necessary steps for her to finally be hired, without a prior interview, by Tragsatec, just at the end of the contact with Ineco”.
Similarly, the resolution emphasized that, although “the witness Isabel Pardo de Vera stated during the trial that José Luis Ábalos did not pressure her,” “it is implausible that a senior Adif executive could take an initiative like the one he himself narrated if it were not by express indication of someone who held a hierarchical position in the company’s organizational chart at the instance, precisely, of whoever at that time occupied the apex of the Ministry’s organic structure in which the railway infrastructure company was integrated”.
The court presided over by magistrate Andrés Martínez Arrieta responds that “Pardo de Vera has not been a party to this case, which prevents the initiation of the incident in the terms provided in article 241.1 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary. Furthermore, she appeared as a witness and the statements contained in the judgment issued by this Chamber are limited to the assessment of her witness statement, in conjunction with the rest of the evidence presented, exclusively in relation to the facts judged in the present procedure, with all guarantees, during the oral trial and in which, even, Ms. Pardo de Vera was assisted by counsel”
With this move, Rodríguez Mourullo sought to prevent the defense of the former president of Adif in the Audiencia Nacional -court where she is charged- from being “conditioned by statements that, if not corrected now, could already project an appearance of guilt onto Isabel Pardo de Vera”.
In his opinion, the judgment in the Mask case contained “a series of statements that prejudge Isabel Pardo de Vera’s involvement in the facts concerning the hiring of Jessica Rodríguez by Ineco and Tragsatec, without her having been able to intervene in the present procedure, fully exercising her fundamental right to defense. Her only intervention was limited to the witness statement given on April 15, 2026. Consequently, she has not been able to defend herself with all guarantees against the factual conclusions that now affect her, which constitutes a violation of her stated fundamental rights”.
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