The time has come for former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz to give his explanations about his role in the so-called ‘Operation Kitchen’, a parapolice operation to steal documents about the PP’s slush fund from the party’s former treasurer Luis Bárcenas, who threatened to hand them over to the judge in the Gürtel case.
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Fernández Díaz, for whom the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is requesting 15 years for his alleged involvement in Operation Kitchen, has completely distanced himself from the plot during his testimony as an accused. “I knew nothing – until it started appearing in the media -, neither from above, nor from below; neither from the right, nor from the left,” said the former Interior Minister, who denied his former number two, Francisco Martínez, who declared that he informed him in 2013 that the former driver of the Popular Party’s former treasurer, the alleged mole of the plot, was a collaborator of the National Police.”
The Interior Minister, who testifies after his former number two in the Ministry, Francisco Martínez, has stated that he will not answer questions from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which places him at the top of the parapolice operation to spy on the Bárcenas family.
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The main evidence against Fernández Díaz, which has been fading throughout the oral trial possibly due to manipulation, are some SMS messages that Martínez took before a notary, in which the latter supposedly informed him that the operation [by Kitchen] had been “successfully carried out.”
“No one from the PP showed me any concern or worry about that particular matter,” in relation to the so-called ‘Bárcenas papers’ that had come out in the press with the alleged payments of extra salaries to party leaders with money from donors.
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Fernández Díaz placed the first time he heard about Operation Kitchen on a timeline between late 2015 and early 2016, once the first headlines started appearing in the press. The former minister handed over the Interior portfolio to Juan Ignacio Zoido at the end of 2016. When during that year, as he recalled, his fellow deputies asked him about the first information on the plot, he asked them not to talk to him about it because these were “sensitive, secret, and reserved” matters.
The former minister maintains that the Bárcenas papers “did not concern him”
If the parapolice operation was orchestrated to try to ensure that compromising information for the Popular Party ended up in the hands of the Gürtel case instructor, it was something that did not concern him because: neither did his name appear in the Bárcenas Papers, nor, according to his version, did anyone from his political party convey to him that there was “concern” about what the former treasurer had in his possession. “Certainly, no one conveyed any particular concern or interest to me,” he assured.
First, the former minister stated that he had no knowledge of the parapolice operation “neither from above, nor from below.” Then he delved into this matter: he explained that he never spoke about the matter with the former Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, – “from above” -, nor with the then Deputy Operational Director, Eugenio Pino, – “from below” -.
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