The audios provided by Anticorruption to charge Cospedal allude to Rajoy nine times: "El Barbas wants to know everything"
The "political connection" of the espionage to Luis Bárcenas with reserved funds that Anticorruption asks to re-investigate points to María Dolores de Cospedal, but also to Mariano Rajoy. For the first, the Prosecutor's Office has asked Judge Manuel García Castellón to summon her again as investigated, as advanced elDiario.es. In the case of Rajoy, no action has yet been requested, but in the new recordings of Commissioner Villarejo, whose Anti-Corruption transcripts are included in his request to reopen the Kitchen case, the former President of the Government and of the Popular Party is mentioned on nine occasions at the time of the events.
These are three new recordings that give rise to a section of the Prosecutor's brief on "references to the knowledge and monitoring of the development of the Kitchen operation by María Dolores de Cospedal and Mariano Rajoy Brei" in said audios.
The relevance of the audios lies in the naturalness with which the then number two of the Ministry of the Interior, Francisco Martínez, and Villarejo, both accused in the Kitchen case, speak of the knowledge of the vigilante operation by Cospedal and Rajoy. This has led Anticorruption to ask the judge, as with Cospedal, to summon Martínez again, considered the coordinator of the operation.
In one of those recordings, the then Secretary of State for Security asks Villarejo how the payments are being made to the driver of the Bárcenas family, the mole of the political brigade. Villarejo assures that he is advancing the money – the case includes receipts charged to the funds reserved and destined for the infiltrator, Sergio Ríos – and they speak of another payment, the one that the commissioner had made to Javier de la Rosa in exchange for information for feed the Pujol case. In this context, Villarejo tells number two of the Interior: "By the way, I spoke the other day (...) and he told me, he promised me that María Dolores, who was going to pay me in September what they owe me, that they still haven't paid me." They have paid."
The second from the Interior goes on shortly after to ask Villarejo to remember the name of a company and they add on the subject: “I have not wanted to say anything to María Dolores or to the […] I also believe that to avoid increasing tensions, you should be the only channel of communication. Why? Because it is very ugly, it is very ugly that the information reaches Barbas by the party, by the Ministry, really. That is my concept, I think that many things have been misunderstood in this double way and, she takes advantage of such and such and the other too and on top of that they do not pay… They are the milk”.
The Internal Affairs Unit of the Police considers since 2018 that the nicknames "El Barbas" and "El Asturiano" in the Villarejo audios they are the ones used by the commissioner, the members of his alleged criminal organization, high-ranking police officers and those responsible for the Ministry of the Interior to refer to the then Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy.
As they comment on the aforementioned recording, one of the ones that Anticorruption wields to charge Cospedal, Villarejo and Martínez assume that Rajoy is already being informed of the espionage operation on Bárcenas, whose interest lay in obtaining documentation that the former PP treasurer hid of box B of the PP and of the bonuses received by its leaders, among them Cospedal and Rajoy himself.
Villarejo delivered in July 2021 the telephone number with which he supposedly communicated with Rajoy, but García Castellón closed the case before it could be determined whether the terminal, owned by the PP, had been used by its president.
In a second recording, Villarejo assures that Francisco Correa, leader of the Gürtel plot, "has a lot of information about El Barbas, from number one...". "El Bárcenas told him that he paid him ten thousand euros every month, raw, of course, that's why remember that one of the things that the cook told me [Sergio Ríos, el chófer] is that there was a note on the receipts, to book, do you remember? ”, He adds. The Bárcenas papers collect payments of black money to M. Rajoy for a value of 163,507 euros between 2003 and 2008.
In his second appearance before the congressional investigation commission, Villarejo assured that he had held a meeting in Genoa with Cospedal and that he went on to endorse that relationship between the PP and the commissioner with the expression "to work". The Villarejo's appearance took place on October 20, 2021. At least seven years earlier, the commissioner told the number two of the Interior the same version.
Villarejo: They passed me like when I go to see the 'lady' in the back, pissed off and such, with tinted windows. I entered through there, in Genoa. I went with 'El Capillas' [el abogado Javier Iglesias, alias 'El Largo']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
“Want to know about the hotel”
In the same conversation, Villarejo and Martínez continue talking about the information provided to Rajoy. "Unfortunately there are many things that do not reach him, about the prisoner's order, about Bárcenas... He wants to know everything, how it is, he wants to know I don't know what, why and how much, details... that I imagine the number will transmit one to him…” For Internal Affairs and Anticorruption, that "number one" is the also investigated Jorge Fernández Díaz, then Minister of the Interior, who should act as an interlocutor with Rajoy.
As for the information allegedly requested by Rajoy, "the prisoner's assignment", García Castellón refused to investigate a second Kitchen inside the prison despite the indications that Bárcenas had been spied on inside the prison, once he entered by order of Judge Pablo Ruz in June 2013. It was one of the three lines of investigation that were interrupted with the closure of the investigation that the judge decreed on July 29, 2021.
The summary indicated that the political brigade could have recruited as a confidant a Colombian computer expert who was going to recover files uploaded to the cloud by Bárcenas when he went on leave and that contained recordings of the former treasurer to Mariano Rajoy. The prisoner was detained on leave in a hostel in Madrid. In the aforementioned recording, Martínez asks Villarejo if Rajoy "wants to know about the hotel." Villarejo replies: “How is it going, if precautions are being taken, that issue is vital to recover this guy, what if, and how good, he knew about the arrest, no… he says: good move, the arrest to double him.”
Martínez asks Villarejo for more information in that same conversation: "Do they tell you that you give the information to Capillas?" that, that is, as a second ratification, you know, right? In itself, number one [Fernández Díaz] He doesn't know how to explain things to her. Or when you talk to him…”
Francisco Martínez: I just talk to him very little. Normally things are explained by the number one
Villarejo: Sure.
Martínez: And number one sometimes doesn't understand them
In the third audio, Villarejo and Francisco Martínez talk about the concern raised by the reports made by the investigator of the Gürtel and Caja B cases, today Chief Inspector Manuel Morocho.
Villarejo: The girl, my friend, calls me very upset that she is fed up (…) They have asked Pinocchio [Morocho] to make another report of specifically one called Merino. And such and such, that has links with I don't know what, with I don't know how much, and that there is the Asturian [Rajoy, según Asuntos Internos] worried and I don't know how much…”
Later, Martínez asks Villarejo how they have "found out about Merino." "To her [sin identificar] Capillas must have told her, who is the one in contact, as you know, with Asturiano and with her”.
They talk about a certain “El Gallardo”, who is also called “El Altanero” and who could also be Inspector Morocho. Villarejo asks for money ("I'm a bit canine with bills") to intervene, but someone told him: "It won't be necessary because El Asturiano is already fed up with the balls and he told me that it won't happen this summer. A fleeing enemy, silver bridge”. Next they talk about a destination in Lisbon, which coincides with the one that the deputy operational director of the Police, Eugenio Pino, architect of the political brigade, He offered Morocho to separate him from the investigations that affected the PP.
In their brief, the prosecutors remind the judge that some lines of investigation have already been opened to find out if the actions of the highest officials of the Ministry of the Interior and of different members of the Police Directorate "had been encouraged or protected also from the leadership of the Popular Party, at that time in the Government of the nation”.
García Castellón closed the investigation on July 2021 without citing Rajoy and filing the case against Cospedal, a decision later endorsed by the Criminal Chamber, but the revelation of new audios in recent months has led the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office to request the creation of a subpiece of the Kitchen case, in response to the request for reopening made three months ago by the popular accusation of the PSOE. The Internal Affairs Unit has drawn up a statement, delivered to the judge, in which he proves that the origin of the audios is Commissioner Villarejo himself.
