Spanish judge indicts SEPI president and 24 others in Leire public-contracts probe
A National Court judge in Madrid added 25 people, including the current chairwoman of Spain's state industrial holding SEPI, to the investigation into alleged rigging of public contracts and influence peddling by a network linked to the ruling Socialist party.
The alleged scheme
Prosecutors describe a repeated, coordinated and structured pattern of illicit intermediation in public procurement. According to the Anti‑Corruption Prosecutor's Office, the main suspects ‑ former SEPI president Vicente Fernández, businessman Antxon Alonso, PSOE operative Leire Díez and former party organisation secretary Santos Cerdán ‑ acted as a nexus between private interests and public decision‑makers. They allegedly influenced administrative rulings, steered contracting procedures and channelled financial aid for their own benefit or that of third parties.
The evidence points to a continued dynamic of illicit intermediation in public contracting, in which the main investigated persons … would have acted as a link of influence between private interests and public decision‑makers, affecting the adoption of administrative resolutions, the outcome of public procurement procedures or the channelling of financial assistance, for their own benefit or that of third parties.
The Civil Guard's central operational unit suspects that Díez, Fernández and Alonso took €700,000 in commissions, involving public companies and SEPI‑dependent entities in five deals under scrutiny. The operations flagged by prosecutors include state‑owned firms Mercasa and Enusa, steel‑maker Tubos Reunidos, the PEPA file and the Forestalia group.
The group ‘Hirurok’
Investigators refer to the core trio of Díez, Fernández and Alonso as ‘Hirurok’. Cerdán is also believed to have been part of the group, operating on a higher hierarchical plane and sharing in the profits. The three were arrested in December 2025, after which Judge Santiago Pedraz of the Audiencia Nacional took charge of the case.
New indictments
On Monday the judge, acting at the request of the Anti‑Corruption Prosecutor's Office, summoned 25 additional people as formal suspects after finding “indications of criminality”. Among them are SEPI's current president, Belén Gualda, former Enusa president José Vicente Berlanga and Rosario Arévalo, a former regional environment councillor in Castilla‑La Mancha. The newcomers come from both the public and private sectors and face accusations of influence peddling, embezzlement, administrative prevarication, misuse of privileged information and membership in a criminal organisation.
- Arrest of Leire Díez, Vicente Fernández and Antxon Alonso; Judge Pedraz takes over the investigation.
- Judge Pedraz indicts 25 additional people, including SEPI president Belén Gualda, at the request of the Anti‑Corruption Prosecutor.
What comes next
The prosecutor’s analysis identifies a common scheme across all the suspect deals: detection of opportunities in economically significant administrative or corporate proceedings, use of personal ties and inside information to influence their handling, manipulation or conditioning of public decisions or procurement processes, and the extraction of economic consideration either directly or through apparently lawful corporate structures. The investigation now enters a wider phase with interrogations of the newly charged individuals expected in the coming weeks.
