Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has been told that transport minister Óscar Puente was the subject of corruption allegations just two hours before Puente resigned on November 3, according to the Madrid daily El Debate.
The newspaper reported that Diego Rubio, the head of Sánchez’s cabinet at the Moncloa, passed on the information at 7pm that day. Puente, who had insisted for a week that he would not step down over the Urda train crash, announced his departure before the standing committee of the Congress of Deputies at about 9pm.
The allegations concern Puente’s time as mayor of Valladolid, a post he held from 2015 to 2023. They centre on Francisco Javier Meléndez Juárez, owner of Patatas Meléndez, a potato company based in Medina del Campo in Valladolid province.
According to the information Rubio is said to have received, the businessman asked Puente to lobby the Spanish Government for subsidies for his firm and Puente did so. In return, the newspaper reported, Meléndez invited him to lavish meals and later to gatherings with prostitutes at his home.
El Debate said it had placed the former minister at the property on at least one occasion. It also reported the existence of a 12-page notarial deed dated May 17, 2024 in which a participant described the parties and listed the properties where they were held, and said that person had confirmed Puente attended once and that prostitutes were present.
The paper identified two public grants to the company: €200,000 from the industry ministry on June 6, 2023, 11 days before Puente left Valladolid town hall, and €2 million from the State credit institute ICO on May 9, 2025, with Puente already in government, under a scheme tied to the economic fallout of the Ukraine War.
Asked about the allegations, Puente questioned whether the reporter was serious and dismissed the material as not being information at all, El Debate reported. Rubio declined to comment.
Meléndez acknowledged hosting Puente at his homes in Valladolid and Alicante but denied that prostitutes were present, describing the former minister as a humble man.
Puente had rejected calls to resign as recently as October 30, saying he had Sánchez’s backing, after the October 28 collision between a Renfe high-speed train and a stationary Iryo service near Urda in Toledo province killed 69 people.
It was the second fatal high-speed crash on the Madrid-Andalusia line this year, after 46 people died at Adamuz in January. Rail unions had accused him of making an Adif control centre worker a scapegoat.
The revelations come as Sánchez’s Socialists face a general election on November 29 and as the Guardia Civil investigates whether the Government’s communications office was behind the leak of control centre audio recordings from the crash.
