Three forged credentials, a college registration and nine days in Vigo's Álvaro Cunqueiro emergency department: the 'Dr Alborés' case ends in an eight-month sentence

In Spain a doctor needs a recognised medical degree, homologation by a ministry if the degree is foreign, and registration with the provincial Colegio de Médicos before a public health service such as Galicia's SERGAS will hire them. The case of a Vigo man convicted in October 2025 shows how a forged document, once accepted at the top of that chain, was treated as proof by everyone below it.

According to GaliciaPress on 28 October 2025, Pablo Alborés Cabaniña was convicted at Pontevedra's Juzgado de Instrucción number 2, in a sentencia de conformidad, of falsifying an official document and of intrusismo, the unlawful practice of a profession. Three credentials were at issue: a medical degree from the Universidad Central de Venezuela dated August 2020 and an internal medicine speciality from a Swiss doctors' body in Bern dated November 2023, both presented to the Ministries of Health and Universities, and a degree in medicine from the University of Santiago de Compostela dated June 2020, presented to the medical college. The court found all three totally inauthentic and stated that he never studied medicine. The Pontevedra medical college registered him in February 2023 after checking with the Ministry, and SERGAS called him in August 2024 to the emergency department of the Hospital Álvaro Cunqueiro, where he worked nine days in the area covering surgery, ophthalmology, traumatology and ENT. He then worked at a private Adeslas centre in Pontevedra in October and November 2024 and resigned on 13 November. GaliciaPress reported the sentence as four months for falsification plus a daily fine, and four months for intrusismo, which he will not serve in prison as a first offender.

El Español reported on 10 November 2025 that he had advertised himself online as a Swiss FMH specialist with a clinic in the canton of Uri, had worked at a Madrid aesthetic clinic, and that suspicions arose from his first day in Vigo; a patient told the paper he dismissed her self-harm crisis by saying that if she really wanted to hurt herself she would. GaliciaPress reported on 30 October 2025 that the Xunta expressed regret and blamed the state endorsement of the title, that the Venezuelan degree had been homologated by the Ministry of Science in 2022, and that Faro de Vigo had reported a formal written complaint from an emergency patient dated August 2024.

The mechanism was trust by inheritance. A ministry homologated a forged foreign degree, the college registered him because the Ministry had, and SERGAS hired him because the college had. On the reported facts, each body relied on the one before it rather than on the universities said to have awarded the degrees.

For students, the practical lesson is that homologation stamps and college numbers can sit on a fake foundation. Verify a doctor through the Colegio de Médicos register, but verify a degree with the university that supposedly awarded it, and never pay an agent who promises that paperwork alone will carry you through.