The European Public Prosecutor's Office examines Adif safety and communications contracts, El Mundo says

According to El Mundo, the European Public Prosecutor's Office is investigating in particular Adif's contracts for "the renovation and improvement of safety, signalling and communications systems" on the Madrid-Seville high-speed line, where the fatal accidents at Adamuz (Córdoba) and Urda (Toledo) occurred. The newspaper published the report in the early hours of Saturday, a day after officers from the Guardia Civil's UCO unit went, on the orders of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, to the headquarters of Adif, Spain's rail infrastructure manager, the rail safety agency AESF and the Court of Audit.

El Mundo cites an estimate by the Court of Audit according to which Adif has been allocated 261.6 million euros of Next Generation EU funds in recent years for renewal projects on the Madrid-Seville track. Among the contracts under examination, according to the newspaper, is the 94 million contract awarded in October 2021 to Thales, now Hitachi Rail, to replace the LZB safety system with ERTMS, which was due to be completed in February 2026 and is running 12 months late, according to former minister Óscar Puente before he resigned.

The newspaper adds that prosecutors will also review the contracts for the GSM-R railway radio system and what happened with maintenance during the migration from one safety system to the other. Science Minister Diana Morant said on TVE, according to El Mundo, that everything reported to the European Union has been certified and that those certificates led to the disbursements.

The European Public Prosecutor's Office said on Friday that it will give no further information until there is progress, and it has not said which contracts or what amounts it is investigating. An investigation into possible fraud does not mean a crime has been committed, nor does it show any link to the cause of the accidents.

Developing story: the contracts and the figure come so far only from El Mundo, read in a reproduction of its article; neither the European Public Prosecutor's Office nor the Court of Audit has publicly confirmed them.