# Spain jails José Luis Ábalos for 24 years in a Covid mask corruption case
Spain’s supreme court on June 22, 2026 handed a 24-year prison sentence to former transport minister José Luis Ábalos after finding that he took bribes tied to public contracts for sanitary equipment, including face masks, during the Covid pandemic.
The ruling is one of the most politically damaging corruption judgments to hit Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government in recent months. Ábalos was not a backbench figure or a peripheral ally. He had long been seen as Sánchez’s trusted right-hand man, which gives the verdict a resonance that goes well beyond the courtroom. The court’s sentence also extends to Ábalos’s aide, Koldo García, who received 19 years in prison.
According to the evidence supplied, the court found Ábalos and García guilty of involvement in a criminal organisation, bribery, misuse of public funds, money laundering and influence peddling. The judges said the seriousness of the case lay in the way it corrupted the purpose of public power and undermined the foundations of a democratic state. That framing shows the court treating the case not just as a financial crime but as an abuse of office that damaged public trust.
The sentencing took place while Ábalos and García were already being held in preventive custody, and both heard the verdict by video conference from prison in Madrid. The case had been heard by a seven-judge panel and drew evidence from public officials, civil servants, expert witnesses and police. The breadth of that record suggests the court considered the evidence extensive rather than circumstantial.
A third defendant, businessman Víctor de Aldama, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Unlike Ábalos and García, his sentence was suspended because he cooperated with the court. The evidence also says he will not have to repay the €3.7 million in commissions he received linked to mask procurement. That detail points to the financial scale of the procurement scandal and the way commissions flowed through the scheme.
The verdict lands amid a wider set of legal and political pressures around Sánchez’s circle. Two days before the sentencing, a separate court ruled that Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, was a flight risk and must surrender her passport while awaiting trial on corruption and influence-peddling allegations. Sánchez himself has not been named in any of the cases, but the accumulation of investigations has widened the political damage.
The Ábalos sentence is notable for another reason: the Guardian says he is the fifth government minister to be jailed since Spain’s democratic transition in 1978. That places the case in a much longer historical pattern of ministerial accountability, while also highlighting how unusual it remains for a senior figure from a sitting administration’s inner circle to receive such a heavy sentence.
For Sánchez, the immediate problem is not only the loss of a former ally but the way the case feeds a broader narrative of scandal and institutional strain. For the Spanish public, the verdict adds another example of pandemic-era procurement becoming a channel for corruption allegations. Masks and other sanitary supplies were an urgent necessity during Covid, which makes any abuse of those contracts especially politically toxic.
The supreme court’s sentence closes one chapter in the case, but it is unlikely to end the political fallout. With other investigations still moving through Spain’s courts, the Ábalos ruling now stands as a stark reminder of how corruption cases can reshape a government’s standing long after the original contracts were signed.
