The court judging the Kitchen case, the alleged parapolice operation to spy on the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas between 2013 and 2015, finished yesterday hearing the recordings submitted as evidence in the case and today will begin to listen to the ten accused, including former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz and former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez. The Prosecutor’s Office is requesting 15 years in prison for both.
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Over the past two weeks, the National Court has played recordings of conversations of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo in which he spoke with several interlocutors about Bárcenas, about an operation “to remove the papers that compromised the president” or directly about the “cook operation,” the name they used to refer to Bárcenas’s driver, Sergio Ríos, recruited as a informant in this alleged plot and also accused.
The former senior officials appear after the playback of Villarejo’s recordings
The court will first call Martínez, followed second by the former minister. The accused will testify after the National Court has heard conversations between Martínez and Villarejo referring to the “cook” and also to El Gordo , as they called commissioner Enrique García Castaño, who during the investigation phase confessed to having entered the painting workshop of Bárcenas’s wife, but was later exempted for health reasons. In these audios, Villarejo can also be heard talking about alleged payments to Mariano Rajoy or a conversation in which María Dolores de Cospedal urged him, when she was the PP’s secretary general, to “stop” the “little notebook,” referring to Bárcenas’s notes about an off-the-books accounting of the Popular Party.
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In any case, a political connection between the PP and the alleged parapolice operation is not being judged, but the trial is limited to the Interior leadership in Rajoy’s government.
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