Anti-corruption accuses Cospedal of lying and asks the Kitchen judge to summon her again as a defendant
The publication in recent months of audios recorded by Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, unknown until now, threatens to overturn the piece that investigates espionage on Luis Bárcenas with reserved funds, an investigation that compromises the Popular Party and the first Government by Mariano Rajoy. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has asked Judge Manuel García Castellón to summon the then General Secretary of the PP and Minister of Defense, María Dolores de Cospedal, as a defendant for ordering Villarejo to "disappear evidence" of the Gürtel and Caja corruption cases B that affected the conservative formation and herself, as reported to elDiario.es sources familiar with the brief presented in the last hours by the Public Ministry.
The three doors of Kitchen that Judge García Castellón closed and that the National Court will decide if it reopens
Know more
The audios referred to by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office have been published jointly by El País and the digital media Fuentes Informadas. In one of them, María Dolores de Cospedal tells Commissioner Villarejo: "The notebook would be better to be able to stop it". The conversation took place on January 18, 2013, the day that El Mundo published on the front page that the PP had hosted a parallel accounting that included bonus payments, from construction entrepreneurs, to its main leaders. "The little book" alludes to what was later known as 'the Bárcenas papers', the entries in box B and the payments that the PP treasurer had made for two decades and that were finally published by the newspaper El País.
This is one of the recordings that, according to the Prosecutor's Office, show that Cospedal lied in her statement of June 29, 2021 as an investigator in the Kitchen case. Before the judge that day he denied having made any commission to the commissioner. And only a month later, García Castellón filed the case against Cospedal despite having in his possession evidence such as the recording in which the husband of the then number two of the PP, Ignacio López del Hierro, appears entrusting the commissioner with "specific jobs"in the presence of his wife, while she nods, in the office that she had on the main floor of Genoa.
The audio of “la libretita” and others that appear reproduced in the last brief of the Prosecutor’s Office have “undoubted relevance”, affirms the Prosecutor’s Office in its brief, and justify the opening of a new "subpiece" to investigate the new evidence. In addition to Cospedal, the Prosecutor's Office requests the declaration as an investigator of the former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez, considered the coordinator of espionage on Bárcenas and the protagonist of several of the recordings provided, in which he appears conversing with Commissioner Villarejo.
The Prosecutor's Office considers, add the sources consulted, that the "political connection" of the espionage to Bárcenas and not be limited to an operation of the Ministry of the Interior, with Jorge Fernández Díaz at the helm – also accused –, of which the then president of the PP, Mariano Rajoy, and his number two, Cospedal, would have had no knowledge or participation. Anticorruption suspects that those responsible for the Ministry of the Interior, the police acted "in concert" with the leadership of the PP, say the sources familiar with the letter. In his appeal to the Kitchen archive, which was dismissed by the Criminal Chamberthe Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office made a devastating criticism of García Castellón in the fall of 2021, accusing him of establishing "an unacceptable red line" around the political leaders of the PP.
One of the published conversations that the Prosecutor's Office asks to incorporate is the one in which Villarejo tells Martínez about the visit to Genoa in which he meets Mariano Rajoy.
– Villarejo: They passed me like when I go to see the 'seño', from the back, pissed off and such, with tinted windows. I entered through there, in Genoa. I went with 'El Capillas', in the room where he always receives me... he there in the kind of glass bubble, in that little room.
– Martínez: Next to his office
– Villarejo: Right next door. The president is coming, such and such, how are you. Look, just to greet you, such and such, I don't know how much... Know that my friend Javier Iglesias enjoys all the sympathy in the world among other things, so get to work. And that was the whole message
– Martínez: To ratify
– Villarejo: Yes, to ratify
This is one of several conversations in which he is quoted the beards either The Asturianin reference to Rajoy, as Internal Affairs concluded, as the alleged connoisseur and instigator of the sabotage of Bárcenas, although the Prosecutor's Office does not ask the judge for now to summon him, neither as a witness nor as an investigator. 'The little chapels' is Javier Iglesiasalso nicknamed "the long one", a lawyer whom the alleged criminal organization of Villarejo considers his contact with Rajoy in several conversations long incorporated into the case.
Internal Affairs attributes the leaks to Villarejo
Regarding the origin of the audios that motivate the new investigation, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office concludes that they come from Villarejo, according to the content of an Internal Affairs report from last June. In it, the police report that the businessman Javier Pérez Dolset gave them a flash drive with numerous audio files last May, acknowledging that he obtained them from Villarejo's lawyer in search of evidence about an assignment to the commissioner of which he was a victim.
Likewise, the Police analyze the files uploaded to a Telegram channel by the activist Alvise Pérez, very popular among the extreme right. In one of those files, the Police have found documents in which the investigated Gemma Alcalá, Villarejo's wife, appears in her properties tab. The Police reinforces these indications with accredited contacts in the piece 28 of the Villarejo case among those who have later been responsible for Informed Sources and the fellow prisoner from Villarejo who tried to sell material from the commissioner on his prison permits. The Prosecutor's Office recalls that Villarejo, before being arrested in November 2017, commented in another recording that he kept seven copies of the material that would later be seized in his house and in another hiding place.
With its letter, the Prosecutor's Office supports the request to reopen the Kitchen case made by the popular accusation exercised by the PSOE after the first publications of new audios, to which the representation of Podemos in the case adhered.
You would not know this information if elDiario.es did not exist. If you like our work and you think it is important, help us:
