Former government president Mariano Rajoy and his right-hand woman in the Popular Party, María Dolores de Cospedal, are sticking to their guns. For them, the party’s former treasurer Luis Bárcenas was the traitor, who hid millions of euros in Switzerland and who deceived people into believing he had compromising papers that he didn’t actually possess. For both, the PP’s finance man is lying, and that’s why the so-called operación Kitchen is an invention. There was “no illegal ‘political or police operation'” against Bárcenas, much less one orchestrated by one of their own, former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, whom Cospedal described as a “straightforward and upright person, who has suffered a lot.”
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The former head of the ministry in charge of the State’s security forces and bodies is the main accused in the trial being held at the Audiencia Nacional for allegedly ordering a “parapolice” operation to save Rajoy and the PP. His former boss has come to his defense. His argument is that he, who was Interior Minister under José María Aznar, knows from experience that a minister does not get down to such details, not even a Secretary of State. This statement will have to be confronted with other evidence that exists in the case. For example, messages that former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez registered before a notary after sending them to Fernández Díaz, in which he told the minister that the operation to steal information from the PP’s former treasurer had been carried out “successfully,” managing to download “all” the information stored in them.
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Rajoy had to travel yesterday to the Audiencia Nacional, on the outskirts of Madrid, in an industrial estate in San Fernando de Henares. Due to his status as former president, he arrived with an entourage of bodyguards to avoid entering through the main door. It was not the first time he had visited this building. In 2017, he was also summoned, also as a witness, in the trial for the Gürtel case, after which it was recognized that the PP had a slush fund, a ruling that led to his government’s downfall after the no-confidence motion promoted by Pedro Sánchez.
Yesterday, it was time to defend that there was no Kitchen, no police operation to steal data from Bárcenas. On the contrary, what there was was a legal operation to discover where Bárcenas was hiding the money and who his front men were. This is the version of the accused, which Rajoy believes and defends tooth and nail, even though several police commanders have already testified before the court, admitting that the surveillance of the former treasurer was not directed by any judge or by the investigative unit, the UDEF.
Rajoy asserts that it is “absolutely false” that he shredded the PP’s slush fund notes in front of Bárcenas
The support for Fernández Díaz and his former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez was backed by two other witnesses, their successors in the ministry Juan Ignacio Zoido and José Antonio Nieto, who assured that there was no trace of the Kitchen operation there.
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Regarding Bárcenas, Rajoy’s stance was more predictable: all lies. “It is absolutely false” that he put the PP’s B accounting into the shredder, as Bárcenas claimed. According to the former treasurer, he recorded Mariano Rajoy shredding the party’s slush fund notes.
Rajoy was the first to testify. He left with a forced smile and handed over to his right-hand woman in Genoa, María Dolores de Cospedal, who began with a full declaration of intent. “I will answer everything I am asked,” she told the court after its president warned her that the case is not definitively closed, so any misstep could lead to a new indictment against her. With a firm voice, though with gaps in her memory, she assured that she “never” had knowledge of a parapolice plot to steal information from Bárcenas. And, as she stated, at that time, despite the former treasurer “going around everywhere” saying he might have documentation to shake the foundations of the PP headquarters, she “was certain” that no compromising papers existed. A statement that contradicts a call recorded by former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo in which Cospedal told him that “Bárcenas’s little notebook [de Bárcenas] would be better to stop.”
Her relationship with Villarejo, whom the Prosecutor’s Office places at the core of the parapolice operation, took up part of the interrogation. She admitted to almost a dozen meetings with the accused. But in them, she never, as she emphasized, gave him any “assignment,” she only asked him “questions.” In the midst of the Gürtel investigation, with the case dominating headlines, she was interested in the “leaks” to the press of the summary that Villarejo might know.
The former general secretary of the PP denies having given any assignment to former commissioner Villarejo
And how did she get to him? Cospedal ratified the version of her ex-husband, businessman Ignacio López Hierro, that it was he who introduced them. But she shielded herself by saying that the commissioner of the sewers “was a very well-regarded person in the Police,” to the point that he had been “decorated by the Minister of the Interior” [en referencia al fallecido Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba]. Furthermore, the former general secretary took the opportunity to introduce a variable, until now little known, against the socialist minister. She explained that some of the meetings with Villarejo were framed within the “more than well-founded suspicion” that she was being spied on, followed, or observed by “someone who had something to do with the Interior Ministry” during José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero’s era.
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