The National Court is holding a new session this Thursday of the trial for the Kitchen case. The leadership of the Ministry of Interior of Mariano Rajoy’s Government is being tried for an alleged plot orchestrated to steal sensitive documentation from former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas, which was damaging to the party’s leaders, amidst the investigation into the Gürtel case and the party’s slush fund. The key witness in today’s session will be precisely Rajoy, who held the position of Prime Minister in the years when the Interior Ministry deployed this plot to seize compromising documents from the former popular treasurer. This is the third time Rajoy has testified in a process of this dimension: he already did so in 2017 in the main part of the Gürtel case, and in 2021 in that of Bárcenas’s papers. On both occasions, he denied the PP’s slush fund, which the courts have deemed proven. Also scheduled to testify this Thursday are former Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido; and María Dolores de Cospedal, who held the position of Secretary General of the Popular Party at that time and was indicted in the case, although she was finally excluded.
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‘Kitchen Case’
Rajoy faces accusations from his former treasurer Bárcenas in the Kitchen trial
Former popular deputy and lawyer Jorge Trías, a key figure in bringing to light the so-called Bárcenas papers (that “little notebook” that gave María Dolores de Cospedal so much headache), used to recall a phrase Mariano Rajoy told him to summarize his vision of politics. “Look, Jorge,” the then president of the PP snapped at him: “Politics is like a reed, when the cyclone comes you have to bend, and when it passes, you return to your usual place.” A metaphor that Rajoy, head of the Government during the espionage operation activated in 2013 within the Ministry of Interior against Luis Bárcenas, practices again since the trial on the Kitchen case began in early April. After his party exhibited him until last month, when he joined the campaign for the Castilla y León elections, the former conservative leader has now bent to let the storm of the oral hearing pass. However, this Thursday he will have to show his head: he is summoned to testify as a witness.
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Good morning. The live narration of the Kitchen case trial begins here this Thursday. The National Court will take testimony from former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, a key witness in the session, starting at 10:00. Rajoy held the position in the years when the Interior Ministry deployed an alleged parapolice plot to seize sensitive documentation from former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas, which was damaging to the party’s leaders, amidst the investigation into the Gürtel case and the party’s slush fund.
In addition to Mariano Rajoy, the court plans to question five other witnesses: María Dolores de Cospedal, former Secretary General of the PP and former Minister of Defense; Juan Ignacio Zoido, Minister of Interior from 2016 to 2018 (after Jorge Fernández Díaz); José Luis Ortiz, who was Cospedal’s chief of staff; and Ignacio Ulloa and José Antonio Nieto, who were Secretaries of State for Security.
