With a firm, calm step and now free —which is no small thing—, Luis Bárcenas arrived this morning at the National Court ready to undergo an interrogation in which he would explain what documents were stolen from him through the so-called Operation Kitchen, allegedly orchestrated by the Ministry of Interior during Mariano Rajoy’s time in office. However, the former treasurer of the Popular Party, with no outstanding issues with justice, delved into an area that the investigating judge did not want to enter: “this operation was initiated by the party leaders.”
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The argument put forward by Bárcenas is based on the fact that a war against him began when the so-called ‘Bárcenas papers’ —with the undeclared accounting of Génova, 13— became known. He has recounted all the steps taken by the PP to try to destroy, manipulate, or falsify those manuscripts and deny them before the judge of the National Court.
When he finally chose to testify on July 15, 2013, acknowledging the veracity of the papers, the PP began an operation against him, deleting his computers or making his life impossible in the prison where he was in pre-trial detention. In the former treasurer’s opinion, the party started first: it’s another thing that there was later a police operation to steal documents from him.
Half a million euros
offer to manipulate the papers with the PP’s undeclared accounting
Firstly, he was offered 500,000 euros through a lawyer to manipulate the documents, then he was threatened with his wife to say that the ‘Bárcenas papers’ were not true. In the end, he did not accept and acknowledged it in court.
From then on, the problems began. Bárcenas recalled how his life changed “drastically” in Soto del Real prison (Madrid) when he blew the whistle on the Popular Party. As he explained, his relationship with the prison management was “correct” until July 15, 2013, when he confirmed the authenticity of his famous papers to the Gürtel investigator.
From then on, as he recalled, his prison entry photograph was leaked. “There is a cause-and-effect correlation because my statement was very forceful against Popular Party executives at that time,” he reflected.
Bárcenas has denounced the “tremendous and permanent persecution” he suffered in pre-trial detention after having pointed fingers at PP leaders in the case of irregular financing. With “a clear intention to humiliate him,” he said, he was subjected to a full body search, his handcuffs were tightened “unbearably” during transfers, or he was given “senseless” sanctions.
Furthermore, he recalled how all kinds of images appeared in prison, the leak of which he attributes to the center’s management to “denigrate him.” The former director of Soto del Real at that time, however, last week attributed the leak of the images to the press to Bárcenas himself.
Bárcenas did not accuse the main defendant, former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, nor his number 2, Francisco Martínez, nor even the accused police commanders. In addition to recounting the PP’s maneuvers to destroy him, his entire focus was on the person he gave his “maximum trust” to and who betrayed him, his driver Sergio Ríos.
From the investigation, it is deduced that Ríos was recruited by the Police to steal documentation and devices from Bárcenas, taking advantage of the fact that Bárcenas was in prison and Ríos was acting as his wife, Rosalía Iglesias’s, driver and protector.
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Bárcenas gave instructions to Ríos to move and deliver his papers on the PP’s accounting, his phones, and other devices to his lawyer. When questioned by the Anti-Corruption prosecutor, Bárcenas acknowledged authorship of the papers seized in this procedure. “That documentation was in my house, and I told Sergio Ríos to take it to give to my lawyer, Javier Gómez de Liaño.” Among the documentation, there was data on electoral campaigns and donations to the party. “It’s my handwriting,” he warned.
However, there was a device that Bárcenas claims was stolen from him and that has caught the attention of lawyers: a pendrive where he kept three audio recordings: one of himself recounting all the undeclared accounting, another of Mariano Rajoy shredding the notes of that undeclared fund, and a third of former Andalusian leader Javier Arenas explaining that he had gone to a notary to record this accounting.
Today he explained that the reasons for these recordings were because he already knew that Switzerland was going to hand over data about his accounts in the Alpine country. These were the measures he adopted to protect himself.
Nothing is known about those audios, only Bárcenas’s word. The pendrive where he kept them was stolen. He also uploaded them to a digital platform, but they disappeared. But what appeared in Rajoy’s audio? According to the former treasurer, it was a meeting in the office of the then president of the party and the government where he explained the remaining balance of the fund. “I hand him the last sheet of those movements, I hand him the balance in an envelope, and he keeps it,” he emphasized. He asks why he has that accounting noted down, and that’s when Bárcenas explains that he does it that way with the previous treasurer Álvaro Lapuerta to control the inflows and outflows of money. “He is very surprised that it is noted down. He turns around in his chair,” and puts it in the shredder.
The defenses try to cling to the fact that these audios have not appeared to try to dismantle the existence of Operation Kitchen, despite evidence that Ríos stole Bárcenas’s phones and handed them over to the Police for a data dump.
Furthermore, they have tried to discredit his testimony because what he said today as a witness in the trial held at the National Court does not match what was declared during the investigation phase. In fact, he has admitted that he lied about the recordings to the PP.
When questioned by Fernández Díaz’s lawyer, he admitted that in a statement during the investigation phase, he claimed not to know where he had kept the pendrive with Rajoy’s audio, leaving open the possibility that it was in his office at the party headquarters on Génova street. However, today he stated that he always kept that pendrive at home and later took it to his wife’s studio, where he says it was stolen.
Another contradiction is that in a statement before investigating judge Manuel García Castellón in 2019, he said he had “never” recorded anyone from his party, whereas now he says he recorded Mariano Rajoy and Javier Arenas. The former treasurer has admitted that at that time, telling the truth clashed with his right to defense. “I was in a period of negotiation with the PP of ‘we are not going to attack each other, we are going to get along’; I was awaiting the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Gürtel case, and if that wasn’t enough, I was pending to defend myself as an accused in the separate Udef bla piece (the party’s undeclared fund). Recognizing the recordings clashed with my defense interests at that moment. I didn’t want the good relationship I was regaining with the PP leaders to be distorted.”
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