Rajoy faces accusations from his former treasurer Bárcenas in the Kitchen trial

Former Popular Party 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 trouble), 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, has been practicing again since the Kitchen case trial began in early April. After his party showcased him until last month, when he joined the Castilla y León election campaign, 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 face: he is summoned to testify as a witness.

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The former President of the Executive, who has always denied his involvement in Kitchen, lands in a process that was marked this week by Bárcenas’s statement. The former PP finance chief overstepped the limits imposed on the trial and, contrary to the thesis that the plot was conceived exclusively within the Interior Ministry, pointed fingers at the former organic leaders of his party. “This operation is initiated by the party’s leaders and then transferred to the Ministry of Interior, if that is proven. But it starts in the party,” he declared, in clear reference to the leadership headed by Rajoy, and from which Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s leadership tries to distance itself.

The former treasurer, like other accusations (such as the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office), does not believe that an espionage operation of this magnitude could have been conceived from the department then headed by Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, a trusted man of the president, without the connivance of the high echelons of the PP. “[The intervention of other people] cannot be ruled out,” the public prosecutor wrote when requesting sentences for the dozen Interior and Police commanders sitting in the dock. In fact, the PSOE, appearing as a popular accusation, unsuccessfully requested at the beginning of the trial that the case be returned to the investigation phase to reopen inquiries, re-indict Cospedal, and delve into the so-called “political connection,” which targeted popular organic officials —a line of investigation that Judge Manuel García-Castellón decided to close due to lack of evidence, for which he had the subsequent support of the Third Section of the Criminal Chamber, which endorsed his resolutions—.

The main beneficiary of Kitchen, Bárcenas and his circle insist, was the then leadership of the PP and its president. The Prosecutor’s Office adds that the plot sought “compromising” documents that the accountant might still have in his possession. “The defendants suspected and believed that audio files corresponding to conversations held with PP leaders, such as its president Mariano Rajoy or Javier Arenas, could be found in the premises [of the former treasurer’s wife],” states Anti-Corruption. Material that Bárcenas claims was “stolen” from him.

“I had three recordings. One of mine, where I explained a series of things related to the procedure and the party’s off-the-books accounting and how it worked. A short recording with Rajoy; and another recording with Javier Arenas,” the former treasurer repeated during his testimony before the court, when he again described the content of the alleged audio that implicated the conservative leader: “I go up to Rajoy’s office […] I hand him the last sheet of those movements where the balance appears. He turns around in the armchair (that’s heard in the recording) and puts it into the paper shredder. The paper, which was a photocopy, is destroyed.”

During his interrogation in the trial about The Bárcenas Papers, where he was summoned as a witness in 2021, Rajoy denied that scene: “I have not shredded what was not in my hands.” “He did not hand me any accounting. The first time I saw [the Bárcenas papers] was published in a national newspaper, [EL PAÍS], on January 31, 2013. Therefore, it is metaphysically impossible for me to have destroyed them,” he stated. In that appearance, the former President of the Government even denied the PP’s parallel accounting that the courts have already proven: “There is no PP slush fund. There will be some papers from Mr. Bárcenas, which he will have to explain,” he dodged. The former treasurer also responded to that interpretation last Monday at the Audiencia Nacional: “The papers that were called Bárcenas’s, belonged to the PP.”

The Set Script

Rajoy never testified in the investigation of the Kitchen case: neither as a defendant nor as a witness. Beyond being one of the alleged beneficiaries of the operation and that the investigations were directed against two of his main collaborators (Fernández Díaz and Cospedal), the most compromising document included in the summary is an Internal Affairs report prepared at the start of the investigations in 2018 which, based on audios intercepted from Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, preliminarily concluded that a person nicknamed El Asturiano would have “knowledge” of the plot. Chief Inspector Gonzalo Fraga, the main Kitchen investigator, pointed out last week that this was the nickname used by some involved to refer to Rajoy.

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Later, in 2021, Villarejo added that he informed the President of the Government by phone of the progress of the espionage against Bárcenas. A testimony that Judge García-Castellón rejected. “No diligence carried out so far allows us to maintain that he had direct communication with any president or prime minister,” the magistrate reiterated in a resolution, attributing to the commissioner an “excessive eagerness to gain notoriety and repercussions” to divert attention. Mariano Rajoy also denied it in the investigation commission opened in Congress on Kitchen: “I don’t know Villarejo and I don’t even recall having seen him anywhere. Therefore, I never met with Villarejo, I never spoke with him, I am not aware that he sent me any message, and I have never in my life replied to a message from him.”

The parties do not expect Rajoy to deviate from the script set over the last few years this Thursday: that is, they believe he will deny any knowledge of the plot or the maneuvers that took place within his party against Gürtel. In fact, at that 2021 Congress meeting, the former president followed that line and stated that Cospedal did not even inform him of the meetings she held with Villarejo when she was general secretary of the PP, despite them being held at the party’s own headquarters. Then, in addition to defending Fernández Díaz’s innocence, he emphasized that he “never” knew anything about the espionage against Bárcenas: “I have never known about the existence of that operation. Therefore, I have not given any instructions about something I evidently did not know. I don’t know what they were looking for. Frankly, I don’t know. I, of course, was not looking for absolutely anything.”

—They referred to you as El Barbas or El Asturiano. Were you aware of or do you recognize yourself by those nicknames? —Deputy Sofía Fernández (Podemos) also asked him.

—Look, I was in politics for almost 40 years, and everything has been said about me. For me, being called El Barbas or El Asturiano, you’ll understand, doesn’t cause me any problem. Suddenly, El Barbas appears. As if they said El Chino, it’s all the same to me —Rajoy dodged.