The European Public Prosecutor’s Office doesn’t investigate train crashes. Its job is EU money: who got it, what they said they would do with it, and whether they did. So when it turns up at a railway, the question it is asking is narrower than the one everyone else is asking, though the two questions may end up overlapping.
On Friday, as Al Jazeera reported, the EPPO said it had carried out investigations at the headquarters of three Spanish bodies: Adif, which manages the rail infrastructure; the state railway safety agency, AESF; and the Court of Auditors. It is looking for possible fraud in the financing of the Madrid–Seville high-speed line. That is the line where, last month, a crash killed at least 69 passengers.
The crash happened on 28 October near Urda, in the province of Toledo. A Renfe AVE train ran into the back of a stationary Iryo train. Both had left Madrid’s Atocha station for Seville, and more than 200 people were injured, according to an account of the collision that also says all 69 dead have now been identified. Transport Minister Óscar Puente said the preliminary investigation pointed to an “inexplicable” order from rail controllers letting one train carry on after a safety failure had stopped another train further up the track, ABC News reported. The failure was in the LZB train protection system, and the open question has been why the control room cleared the AVE to go ahead when the rules called for something far more cautious.
What the prosecutors said
The EPPO’s own press release, dated 6 November, says the office opened the case on its own initiative and is being helped by the Guardia Civil’s Central Operational Unit, the UCO. The suspected fraud concerns EU funds allocated to renovating and upgrading the line’s “safety, signaling and communications systems.” The release calls itself an “exceptional confirmation”, made because of the strong public interest, and adds that “no further details will be made public at this stage.”
That is about as forthcoming as a prosecutor gets, and more than they usually are. You will notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say the money had anything to do with the crash. It doesn’t name a contract, a contractor, an amount or a suspect. It names a category of spending, safety, signalling and communications, which happens to be the category of equipment now at the centre of the Urda investigation. The release itself makes the connection only by mentioning the accident.
The general shape of a subsidy fraud case is simple enough. Here is a hypothetical, not a description of anything alleged here. Imagine a public body gets European money to replace a signalling system. It certifies that the work was done to a certain standard, at a certain cost, by a contractor chosen in a certain way. A fraud case asks whether those certifications were true: whether the work was done, whether it was done as described, and whether the contracts were awarded properly. You can answer all of that without ever working out why a particular train was where it was on a particular morning. It is also conceivable that the answers would bear on it.
The auditor gets audited
The odd name on the list is the Court of Auditors. Adif runs the network and AESF regulates its safety, so you would expect investigators to want their files. The Court of Auditors is the body whose job is checking public spending. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that prosecutors went there for the auditors’ paperwork rather than because they suspect the auditors: if someone has already gone through how the line’s money was spent, that file is the obvious place to start. Still, a body that normally does the checking now has police going through its documents for a foreign prosecutor, and it can’t enjoy that.
This is also the second time this year the EPPO has gone after this line. In January, 46 people died when two high-speed trains collided near Adamuz in Andalusia, as Al Jazeera reported at the time when the toll was still rising. In March the EPPO opened a first investigation into suspected subsidy fraud involving funds for renewing track on the same line, Spain in English reported. Two disasters nine months apart have killed 115 people on Spain’s oldest high-speed line. Two fraud investigations into how it was paid for have followed.
Neither prosecution will decide who was responsible for the deaths. According to Euronews, the EPPO’s financial inquiry is separate from the Spanish court proceedings into what caused the crashes and whether anyone is criminally liable. A court in Orgaz is handling the Urda case, and Spain’s independent accident investigation authority, AITAT, has opened its own technical inquiry. So three different bodies are now examining the same stretch of track. One wants to know why the trains collided, one wants to know who should answer for it, and one wants to know whether the paperwork behind the signalling budget was honest.
For now the EPPO has said all it intends to say. Given how rarely prosecutors announce searches at all, the announcement was the unusual part. Saying nothing further is what they normally do.