Isidro Sánchez does not want to say more in the trial of the Kitchen case. That becomes clear when prosecutor César de Rivas senses that the Colombian’s dodges border on contradiction. Or lying. This 50-year-old man is a key figure to understand how the spying on Luis Bárcenas extended to his stay in the Soto del Real prison (Madrid), where they both formed a “friendship” by sharing life behind bars, after the former popular treasurer was first imprisoned in 2013 in preventive detention (when he threatened to spill the beans). But Isidro Sánchez, who was serving a sentence at that time for drug trafficking, is not making it easy this Thursday, during the sixth session of the oral hearing.
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—Following your statement that you had computer knowledge, did Bárcenas entrust you with any task? —the public ministry representative launches as the witness interrogation begins.
—During a leave I was granted, I had to delete some files that he told me where they were —he specifies, before adding that he was going to charge the former treasurer 5,000 euros for it.
This first answer is one of the clearest that Isidro Sánchez has given, thus supporting, at least, part of the thesis of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and Bárcenas, who stated during the investigation phase that he entrusted his prison companion with accessing and deleting files containing audios that incriminated high-ranking PP officials, such as Mariano Rajoy, in the party’s irregular financing. “The goal of recovering that information was not to use it, but at that time quite the opposite, it was to destroy it, because there had been an approach to me by people linked to the PP,” the former treasurer assured during his testimony in the Kitchen investigation.
The former inmate added this Thursday that, however, he was never “handed” the pendrive with the material he was supposed to destroy. According to him, he was arrested during the leave (“due to a non-existent pending judicial cause,” specifies the Prosecutor’s Office); and returned to prison without being able to carry out the task. The accusations, which maintain that the defendants were aware of these Bárcenas maneuvers, emphasize that all this was reflected in the agendas of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, one of those involved in the espionage plot; which shows that they were monitoring him to try to steal compromising files about the popular party members.
In fact, an Internal Affairs report points in that direction. This police analysis highlights that when Sánchez went on leave on March 10, 2014, Villarejo noted in his agenda: “Notice of target’s exit, friend of LB.” A day later, he added: “In the end, LB’s friend was arrested at the Chamberí police station.” A series of events that the former inmate confirmed before the court this Thursday, although he clarified that he was arrested on the 12th in a hostel, from where he was taken to the police station in the Madrid neighborhood of Chamberí.
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Sánchez’s testimony has clashed in other aspects with Bárcenas’s. The former treasurer claims that he gave him a note with instructions, which was intercepted from his companion during a cell search. The Colombian denied this Thursday: “We never wrote anything. Everything was verbal […] They did a surprise search on me and never found any paper.” However, Penitentiary Institutions confirmed the PP accountant’s version and provided a copy of that note, which read: “Álex, all M. R.’s audios must be destroyed when I give you the order. Nothing must remain. It is my commitment. Please start recovering them. Regards.” Prisons informed the National Court that it does not know where the original is, nor “to which authority it has been submitted.”
For its part, according to the investigations, Villarejo also recorded the existence of that document in his notebooks: “Several calls about paper intercepted from Sánchez, LB’s colleague. The person who has the audios that must be nullified must be located,” he noted on March 4, 2014.
“The defendants controlled all movements of the inmate [Isidro Sánchez] from the time contact with Luis Bárcenas began in the second half of 2013 until March 10 and 11, 2014, when the deletion of the audio files that Bárcenas said he had recorded with conversations held with Mariano Rajoy and Javier Arenas was to take place,” states the Anti-Corruption indictment, which affirms that there is no evidence that the plot “managed to obtain a copy of said files.”
Isidro Sánchez’s testimony this Thursday has been quite obscure. The former inmate denied talking about this matter with his sister; but the prosecutor highlighted that during the investigation he admitted asking her to go receive the money, which she opposed. In turn, the lawyer of Jorge Fernández Díaz, Rajoy’s Minister of the Interior and main accused, pointed out to the court that during the investigation phase he also denied being tasked with deleting files. Amid hesitations and evasions, the witness then dodged the contradiction like this: “They were supposed to give me something that they never gave me […] And I don’t know what was on that pendrive.”
