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EU Probes Fraud in Spain’s Deadly Rail Crash LineWorld
The European Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating suspected fraud in contracts for the high-speed line where an October crash killed 69 people.
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The crash took place in Adamuz, in the province of Cordoba, and the investigation will examine how contracts for work on the line were awarded. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office, known as the EPPO, is the European Union body responsible for investigating fraud affecting the EU’s financial interests, and its decision to open a case places the Spanish rail line under formal scrutiny at the European level.
According to the report, a similar EPPO investigation was opened in March after another accident that claimed 46 lives in Andalusia in January. The two cases together mean that two deadly accidents on Spanish rail infrastructure are now the subject of European fraud inquiries, raising questions about how construction work on the lines was commissioned and supervised.
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Spain’s transport minister, Oscar Puente, resigned on Tuesday after being implicated in alleged irregularities in the awarding of contracts. His departure came as the questions around the contracts moved from the technical to the political level, with the minister’s own role in the awarding process coming under scrutiny.
A Spanish court has also opened an investigation into officials responsible for the maintenance, management and surveillance of the track. That inquiry runs alongside the European investigation and focuses on the people charged with keeping the line safe, rather than on the contracts for building it.
The EPPO said it would give no further details in order to safeguard the investigation. That is its standard position while an inquiry is at an early stage, and it means the scope of the suspected fraud and the contracts under examination have not been made public.
The Adamuz crash was one of the deadliest rail accidents in Spain in recent years, and the opening of a European fraud investigation adds a new dimension to the aftermath. Beyond the question of what caused the crash itself, investigators will now look at whether the contracts for the line were awarded properly and whether public money was handled as it should have been.
For the families of the 69 people who died, the investigations offer a path to answers about the decisions made before the crash. The court inquiry into maintenance and surveillance will examine the condition of the track and the oversight of those responsible for it, while the EPPO case will examine the contracts behind the line’s construction.
The resignation of the transport minister shows how quickly the affair has reached the top of Spain’s government. With both a European and a Spanish investigation now under way, the coming weeks are likely to bring further detail about the contracts, the officials involved and the state of the line where the crash happened.
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